I like the look of the new m4 Mac mini, and am thinking of replacing my iMac (2020) 3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i7 with 64gb memory with one of these impressive looking wee beasties…
I have loads of VSTs, including east west opus, play, Spectrasonics, and I want to improve the speed that these load at and improve speed of rendering and mix down etc…
So where do I spend the money?
Do I need loads of memory? I currently have 64gb but to get this on the new m4 Mac mini I’d need the M4 pro and pay £600!! Eek!
So with the new M4 processors, how much memory do I need to improve the speeds I mentioned?
I guess my options are:
Apple M4 chip with 10‑core CPU, 10‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine
32GB unified memory
512GB SSD storage
OR
Apple M4 Pro chip with 12‑core CPU, 16‑core GPU, 16‑core Neural Engine
24GB unified memory. (or upgrade to 48 gb?Extra £400! but if its worth it…)
512GB SSD storage
Also planning to get a fast external drive for samples, maybe 4 gb Crucial X9 pro which should loading times…
They’re not available until at the very least this coming Friday, so nobody really knows just how much of an improvement they are aside from Apple’s own specs and rants.
My M2 Pro was quite an improvement over the 2020 i7 Mini, so I would think either one should be just fine. Get whichever one you can afford at the time.
if this is your final budget i would get max ram…ram is not expandible in any way, storage is, kind of because you could always use a TB5 (or TB4) NVME casing with NVME external flash for more storage…
this would cost you 200-300 for 4TB of extra harddisk space, later.
Good ext nvme casings are very, VERY fast.
Still, 512 GB for system disk is not the biggest nor is 32GB mem.
If you are professional:
Any chance you could go for 1Tb with 64Gb? This would set you up for years to come…
OW and dont expect bounce/render times of big projects to become lightning fast:
more CPU = more plugins = more time
i have a super duper maxed out M2 Max, and run into 7-8 minutes for big renders sometimes (but normally its very fast hehe)
I would suggest looking at how much memory you are using at the moment and NOT getting anything with less RAM. Although the faster disk access times will mean you can reduce preloading sizes (and hence memory useage) I suspect you will end up using the RAM anyway.
Before you call your banker for a new mortgage to max out on RAM, check how much RAM your current machine is actually using out of your available 64GB.
You could be surprised!
And by working smarter (like freezing or bouncing tracks you are not actively working on, esp. samplers) you can do quit a bit with 24GB already!
Although for peace of mind, I would still be tempted to stretch the budget to get the 48GB, I’d bet it’s already overkill… esp. if you get a fast SSD!
The crucial x9 you’re looking at is no slouch, but the x10 (or Samsung’s T9, and some others) is twice as fast, and that will make much more difference in your loading time than anything else.
Even better now, with the M4 Pro you have thunderbolt 5 and have an external SSD just as fast as the internal SSD would:
Even if you go with the non-Pro M4 that has “only” thunderbolt 4… you will still achieve about 4000MB/s with this drive (or similar), which is 4x the speed of the Crucial x9.
In summary: a machine with a 6000MB/s SSD and 24GB RAM will give you a better experience than a machine with a 1000MB/s SSD and 64GB RAM, in 99.99% of the use cases.
Maxing on RAM was required in the slow hard drive years, but this gets progressively much less relevant with ever faster SSDs.
Is the X10 faster on the M4? Pretty sure that on previous versions it was the same speed as the X9 as the Mac didn’t support the USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 protocol.
TB3, 4 and 5 are just a branding setting minimum speeds for USB, DP, PCIe and Power (PD).
Having TB3 and TB4 means it supports USB at 40Gbps and TB5 means 80Gbps.
The Crucial X10 needs 20Gbps, or USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which is one of the modes mandatory for TB4 or 5 compliance.
So if everyone did their job right (truly compliant) it should work fine.
If it goes down to 10Gbps, something was wrong, possibly using the wrong or defective cable.
Every review I’ve seen says it drops to 10G on a Mac as Apple don’t support the dual channel USB that kicks the speed up to 20Gbps. It’ll be interesting to see once the new Macs are available. I just need to get clearance from the Accounts department (i.e. the Wife )
Silicon Macs handle RAM very different. I had 64gb on my last windows machine with i7. Now i have 16GB with an M1 chip. Everything is way faster. No issues. Lots of tracks and Diva instances. In 3 years, I never ran out of ram using Cubase. (Sometimes when using After Effects, but that’s a whole different story). No EastWest libraries in use here though
I’d say for audio production on a M4 machine 32GB should be totally fine. But as others stated, it’s not expandable. One should keep that in mind.
MY FRIENDS! Why are none of us mentioning the importance of the performance cores?! Yes, we all know the importance of RAM, but the DAW itself benefits greatly on the amount of access it has to performance cores.
IMO, the M4 Pro chip with the upgraded cpu cores is even more important than maxing out the RAM. If he’s on a budget, I bet that 24gb of RAM is PLENTY, but the most workflow improvement will come from maxing out the processor.
The efficiency/performance core balance of the base M4 is not suitable for music production. On the other hand, the 14 core M4 Pro with 10 performance cores has Geekbench scores that are insane and would be great for music production. Even with 48GB RAM the price is under $2000.
Maybe take your own advice, eh? Also, EastWest Hollywood Orchestra is 900+ gigabytes. Just by way of example. That’s a tight fit on a 500 gigabyte drive.
And no matter how fast an SSD is, RAM is faster.
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