Benchmarking all the Macs I have around for fun
Just for fun, I've use quicksubs' benchmark mode to see how fast the 4 Macs I have access to are and how they heat up when under load.
- M2 Mac mini
- A18 Pro MacBook Neo
- M4 Pro MacBook Pro (higher core version)
- M5 Pro MacBook Pro (higher core version)
For repeatability, I ran the following command on this file.
quicksubs bench --warmup 0 --runs 20 --csv benchfile.csv bench.mp3
Average speed
The overall average times are about what you might expect. The M5 Pro is a bit faster than the M4 Pro, and they're both way faster than the M2 and A18 Pro.
Speed over time
So a couple interesting things here looking at the times over all 20 runs.
- Inexplicably, the Pro devices got faster as they went. All the times were within a couple of seconds, but suffice it to say that they started fast and stayed fast.
- The MacBook Neoquite quickly heated up and slowed down from its first run.
- The Mac mini is a quirky chart, but I can explain. For the first 7 runs, I was sharing its screen from my MacBook Pro, and then I stopped screen sharing after that. And yes, this makes the whole M2 test a bit unfair, but hey, let's just recognize that the M2 is a bit faster than the 20 run average says, and that screen sharing to another device of course has a bit of a performance hit.
Temps
The Neo gets real hot real quick, the Mac mini gets kinda warm, and the MacBook Pros just kinda hang out at the same point. All 3 laptops were sitting side by side and didn't have anything else running, so I'm not sure if it's expected for the M5 to run hotter than the M4, but that's what I saw here.
Anyway, no real takeaways here, benchmarking is just fun.