Thanks joema. My searching last night on the M4 Pro mini found good numbers too. I will be interested to see your testing results. I'm sure everyone at next week's FCP Creative Summit would be interested too. Are you attending?
If you have any time, I'd love to get your take on my panicking issue. This 2018 5K iMac kernel panicked once on Wednesday and once on Thursday while running FCP 10.6.5 in Ventura 13.7.1. Yesterday I ran GPU tests using two instances of an in-browser GPU stress test (mprep dot info slash gpu) along with playing a couple YouTube videos for about an hour. While the GPU tests were running the YT videos were only able to do about 2-3 FPS. At the same time I also ran 12 'yes' processes that got the CPU close to 100%. Fans were cranking but no problems over the hour. I then ran AJA and BM disk speed tests on SMB mounted QNAP volumes via the Sonnet Thunderbolt to 10GbE adaptor. Also no problems. I rebooted into Diagnostics mode and it reported no problems.
I swapped the keyboard and mouse, disconnected an inexpensive TimeMachine SSD and ran FCP 10.6.5 with a relatively simple library on a QNAP 10GbE NAS -- three 5 minute projects of 4K FX6 multicam footage with only a couple built-in effects. After about 15 minutes, it kernel panicked and rebooted itself. I can't find mention of any of the panics in the logs.
This iMac is of the Fusion Drive era and the spinning drive failed a few years ago. I took the iMac apart and replaced it with an OWC SSD and left the smaller original SSD. Yesterday I attempted Recovery mode twice to re-install Ventura on an external Crucial SSD, but I'd check on its progress periodically and see it back at the login screen as if it had rebooted back to the internal SSD. The external SSD didn't have a complete System on it.
I realize I didn't run disk tests on the internal SSDs, so I'll try that next. I also haven't run any RAM tests. I won't be in front of the machine again until tomorrow, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts at what you'd look at. Also, why no panic logs? Thanks for any advice.