Mac Mini with M2 Pro dominates M1 Max in new benchmarks

Apple’s new M2 chips have finally made their way to the desktop and laptops. In new Geekbench scores, they’ve already proven their worth.

Geekbench, the benchmark tool used around the world, has a nifty feature that uploads scores to the web. We’ve seen it happen a few times before CES, as laptops began to leak out through it.

Now, someone has tested and uploaded the scores of the upcoming Mac Mini with an M2 Pro. Single-core scores look decent, but nothing too exciting. As of right now, it bests the M1 Max’s 1727 single-core score with a neat 1952.

Multicore scores

While it might look like an incremental increase to some, it’s the multicore scores that are truly impressive. Clocking in at 15013, the M2 Pro inside the Mac Mini pulls ahead of the M1 Pro by 4937 points. Meanwhile, the M2 Pro can even best the M1 Max, found in the Mac Studio and MacBooks.

The score differences are still surprising, as the M1 Max can achieve a Geekbench score of 12643 (with a single core score of 1727). If you’re looking to get into the Mac ecosystem or upgrade from your MacBook, it might be time to start thinking about the M2 Pro as your baseline.

The M1 Pro is what currently powers our everyday laptop, the MacBook 14-inch. With it, we’re able to last most of the day running intensive apps like DaVinci Resolve. When testing out rendering from the video editor, we found it bested the main PC with a Ryzen 2700X, RTX 2070, and 32GB of RAM by a fair margin.

This does mean, however, that the M2 Pro inside the Mac Mini might be the best bang-for-buck desktop PC available out of the box for content creators and the like. If it’s able to stand up to an M1 Max and then dominate it in the benchmarks, it’s already proven its worth as a new machine.

Other reports have seen the regular M2 chip in the Mac Mini perform similarly to the one found in the MacBook Air 2022. We suspect it’s going to be the same story for the upcoming laptops too.