I have a PC on the other side of my wall from where I'm sitting with a 7800X3D and an nvidia 4090. It's for gaming only most of the time, though I do take advantage of the 4090 for some basic LLM stuff, mostly for local audio transcription and summarizing (I take a lot of notes out loud, I speak faster than I can write). The rest of the time it's playing AAA gaming titles at full tilt at 5120x1440, full res, getting 60fps on basically anything I throw at it, all while sucking down 600W (400 for the GPU alone while playing Cyberpunk). It's a beast. I love it.
I have an M4 Mac Mini on my desk. At full tilt it pulls 30W. It scores higher in benchmarks than my gaming PC. It cost less than my 4090 did on its own, and that's including an upgraded third-party iBoff storage upgrade.
Of course, trade offs and process size differences abound; the M4 is newer, I can pack way more RAM into my PC years after I built it. I can swap cards. I can add another internal SSD. It can handle different kinds of load better, but at a cost of FAR more power draw and heat, and its in a full tower case with 4 180mm fans moving air over it (enough airflow to flap papers around on my desk). It's huge. Lumbering. A compute golem, straining under the weight of its own appetite, coils whining at the load of amps coursing through them.
Meanwhile, at idle, my Mac mini uses less power than the monitors connected to it, and eats up most of the same tasks without ruffling its suit. At full tilt, it uses less power than my air purifer. It's preposterous how good it is for what it costs to buy and run. I don't even regret not getting the M4 Pro.
If you replaced your M4 with an M5 you'd get more performance but the power usage will go up substantially.
OTOH, if you replaced your 7800X3D with Raptor Lake you'll get similar performance for less power.
That was the point I was trying to make: 2025 processors have flipped the script. x86 used to be the power hogs and apple M processors were efficient. In 2025, Apple chose to increase power to increase performance, Intel is the manufacturer with substantially increased efficiency in 2025.
I have an M4 Mac Mini on my desk. At full tilt it pulls 30W. It scores higher in benchmarks than my gaming PC. It cost less than my 4090 did on its own, and that's including an upgraded third-party iBoff storage upgrade.
Of course, trade offs and process size differences abound; the M4 is newer, I can pack way more RAM into my PC years after I built it. I can swap cards. I can add another internal SSD. It can handle different kinds of load better, but at a cost of FAR more power draw and heat, and its in a full tower case with 4 180mm fans moving air over it (enough airflow to flap papers around on my desk). It's huge. Lumbering. A compute golem, straining under the weight of its own appetite, coils whining at the load of amps coursing through them.
Meanwhile, at idle, my Mac mini uses less power than the monitors connected to it, and eats up most of the same tasks without ruffling its suit. At full tilt, it uses less power than my air purifer. It's preposterous how good it is for what it costs to buy and run. I don't even regret not getting the M4 Pro.