Question Best M1 or M2 for two monitors 4K at 144Hz ?

[csabbi]

Hello Everyone.

I would like to ask some experts in the upper mentioned architecture, are there any variants of M1 or M2 doesn't matter if laptop or desktop variant, but I would like to connect 2 monitors with 4K resolution with 144Hz refresh rate.

Thank you for your answers.

 

[Lutfij]

I'd get the latter, the M2, since it's a more refined chip when compared to the M1 + Further reading.

 

[csabbi]

I'd get the latter, the M2, since it's a more refined chip when compared to the M1 + Further reading.

Thank for the link, I have read it carefully, but the website doesn't states 144hz anywhere. Just 4K 30Hz or 60Hz.

This means, that none of the Mac mini or M1 Pro or Max is capable doing so? No native support of 144Hz?

 

[bill001g]

What application do you want to run. You can't expect any laptop to do what a $2000 3090ti card can't even do. Many have trouble even getting a single 4k monitor to 120fps in many games.

 

[csabbi]

What application do you want to run. You can't expect any laptop to do what a $2000 3090ti card can't even do. Many have trouble even getting a single 4k monitor to 120fps in many games.

It is mainly not for games. It is for my eye comfort. Daily 10 hours of sitting infront of a 60Hz monitor, is really exhausting my eyes. And I want to invest in 4K monitor for 144 refresh rate. And I don't really need laptop as I mentioned in the starting quote.

 

[bill001g]

In general as long as the refresh rate is higher than stuff on your screen changes you will not be able to see it. I mean with a static screen saver it could be 1 frame a second and it would look fine since every pixel is the same.
Games tend have images that change very quickly so need the most refresh rate so you can see the changes.

A lot of the limitation are related to ports. It was not long ago you had to hook 2 HDMI cables to a single monitor to get it to run 4k 120hz. You are going to have to look up what type of ports your monitor has and what type of ports the apple has. Apple likes to run non standard stuff like thunderbolt. Last I heard thunderbolt does not have the bandwidth to run 2 4k 144 hdr monitors. What you are going to need is multiple HDMI 2.1 or displayport 2.0 to run this. Most apple things are using converter boxes to do this and I don't know what limitations they introduce.

You have to be realistic here. Running a single 4k monitor at 144hz with 10bit color need almost 40gbit of data rate. Running 2 of these need 80gbit and that is pushing the limits on a single display port 2.0 connection.