The two AAA games we could directly compare, Rise of the Tomb Raider and
Total War II: Warhammer, showed a near-run competition between the Iris Xe
IGP on the Intel whitebook and what we saw from the MacBook Air, the two
trading blows. The Mac mini, with its more liberal cooling scheme and extra
GPU core, outpaced them both, but all three are in the same rough ballpark.
(Note that we tested the Tiger Lake whitebook on these games at 1080p, but
the MacBook Air cannot handle that resolution, so we tested at the slightly
higher and marginally more demanding 1,920 by 1,200. We tested the Mac mini
at both.)
We did not test the Tiger Lake whitebook with Heaven 4.0 (we no longer have it
in hand), but we did test the latest Dell XPS 13, which also employs Iris Xe. It
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GFXBench 5 Metal, which uses the Metal API and illustrates what the M1 is
more likely capable of with native software (i.e., much-enhanced performance).
In the course of testing, one big thing we noticed: Through all these
benchmarks, pressing the CPU and GPU to their presumptive limits, the Mac
mini was whisper quiet. Now mind you, the Mac mini (like the new M1-based
MacBook Pro) does have an active cooling solution inside, unlike the fanless
MacBook Air. But this writer had to stick his ear right up on the rear I/O to even
get a hint of it. It didn’t rev up noticeably at even the peak of a Handbrake
conversion grind, or after a series of six consecutive GPU game benchmarks.
And the chassis stays remarkably cool throughout. Not that the Mac mini is an
ideal pick for a production computer gnashing away at hours-long renders, but
the kind of light-use everyday work and play we simulated reveals one cool
customer.
THERE’S NOTHING SMALL ABOUT THIS MINI’S IMPACT
Let’s start with the obvious. If you’re in the market for a macOS desktop, you’re
looking at four choices: a compact Mac mini, a relatively small all-in-one
consumer Mac (the 21-inch iMac), a larger consumer or pro-grade all-in-one
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house content-creation Mac Pro. There’s not a lot of use-case crossover; if you
have a monitor or two you wish to carry over to your new Mac, there’s scant
overlap between Mac mini and Mac Pro needs. So if you’re wedded to macOS,
the desktop divisions are pretty clean.