 This is the most powerful computer you can buy for $4,000. Or so Apple would have you believe. Could this tiny box, basically two Mac mini's stacked on top of each other, really be more powerful than a Core i9 or an RTX 3090 from the PC world? Or is Apple cherry picking their data again? Come along for the ride, because it's more difficult than you'd think to find out. But it's easy to talk about our sponsor. Jackery, the Explorer 1500 power station provides 1500 watt hour capacity, allowing up to seven devices to charge at the same time. Only four hours are needed to recharge from zero up to 80%. And you can get 10% off with code LinusTechTips at the link below. We've got both the M1 Max and M1 Ultra Mac studios here, along with the 16 inch M1 Max MacBook Pro and a PC bench to compare against. For reference, that PC bench runs a little more with shipping than a base spec M1 Ultra. While our Ultra, as specced, costs about $1,800 more. I wanna start off with gaming this time because it highlights exactly why it's so difficult to benchmark Apple Silicon. Dolphin, a native GameCube emulator that I've tested extensively with M1 chips, was struggling to reach frame rates above 120 when I know it should be capable of much more because I can crank the resolution without losing much performance. That indicates that we're hitting a CPU bottleneck since it only uses a few cores at once. We are off to a bad start here. The rest of the games in our typical lineup use the Rosetta compatibility layer to translate Intel native apps because native Apple Silicon ports are few and far between. Civ 6 is such a mess that I don't even want to talk about it. Firaxis really needs to get on a native port, maybe bundle it with some nice expansion packs if they need to. M1 Ultra doesn't perform very well at all in CSGO either with a measly 95 FPS average and a healthy dose of stuttering to go along with it thanks to that game's use of the OpenGL API. Long ago deprecated on Mac OS. Feral Interactive's port of Shadow of the Tomb Raider does a little bit better thanks to using Apple's modern Metal 2 API. But remember, we're running at 1080p here. The frame rate simply does not compare to the PC bench and this clearly isn't indicative of M1 Ultra's performance potential. The same is true of Total War Warhammer 3, a game that straight up requires Apple Silicon, but runs through Rosetta anyway? Yeah, they say that there's no performance penalty and they're doing it because they need certain features only found on Intel Macs. What a mess. The M1 Ultra for its part breaks the 60 FPS barrier at nearly double the performance of the M1 Macs, but lags to about half the performance of the PC bench. So a win and a loss. Gaming on M1 is such a minefield that the only two games that are fully native to Apple Silicon are massively multiplayer. World of Warcraft and EVE Online. I've never played EVE and I honestly have no idea how I would benchmark it. As for WoW, last time my lack of game knowledge made our previous benchmark pointless. Thankfully, I do know someone who still plays WoW and she threw together a simple Lua script that logs the current frame rate at regular intervals, letting us for the first time truly get something close to frame data out of a Mac without pulling a digital foundry and analyzing video capture. This is its own minefield within the minefield, however. Even local multiplayer games introduce two machines worth of uncertainty instead of just one, let alone an MMO with other players and server instances to deal with. So we made the script also output the current location and the number of players in the vicinity into CSV format, which should let us sanitize our data. For our testing, we dragged the heal shaman through the same area a total of four times across each of our test systems and averaged the results. Before we talk numbers though, check this out. The M1 Ultra exhibited some visual artifacting with assets blinking in and out of existence. This didn't affect stability, but it was definitely a thing. Clearly they didn't have the M1 Ultra in mind when they made this native port. Now the numbers. The M1 Ultra impressively captures between 70 and 88% of the RTX 3090 PC bench and doesn't dip below 60 FPS. Meanwhile, the M1 Max doesn't do so hot, which indicates that Wow is able to utilize either those extra CPU cores or the additional memory bandwidth available on M1 Ultra. Since this test skews heavily towards the GPU at 4K max settings, my money is on memory bandwidth. Interestingly, the Mac Studio loses less performance than the PC bench does with a consistent 25 players compared to runs where the players dropped out. This could just be run-to-run variance, but the fact that it held across both of our Mac Studios is a pattern worth bringing up. But productivity, not gaming, is what Apple was talking about when they said that this was the most powerful desktop you can buy for $4,000. And to be fair to them, it's where most potential buyers will spend their time with a Mac Studio. But there are inconsistencies here too, and we'll go through them one by one. Cinebench and Cinema 4D in general isn't fully ready for Apple Silicon, but multi-threaded CPU performance isn't far off from the Core i9, which is frankly amazing. It's basically what we'd expect at double the performance of our M1 Macs. Geekbench is another test that's not fully optimized. CPU usage doesn't quite max out for some reason, but it's not far off per thread, and it does surpass the Core i9's multi-threaded performance. That is impressive, though it does slip when we move over to the GPU test, which is obviously not correct. With double the GPU cores, we'd expect a linear improvement unless we're limited somewhere else, but M1 Ultra is only about 60% faster than the M1 Macs here, way behind the RTX 3090. Let's move away from synthetics and into the real world, starting with Blender's CPU rendering. We're looking at a worse showing that our Core i9 from both Apple machines, albeit with roughly correct scaling between the M1 Ultra and M1 Macs. This tells me that perhaps there's some optimization still left to be done here, and that's definitely the case with the GPU renderer, which is still quite early and falls well behind our RTX 3090, which we tested with the traditional CUDA renderer, not the re-accelerated optics renderer. Another major category for prospective Apple customers is development. Compile time isn't everything, but with the Mac Studio coming with a minimum of 32 gigs of RAM to take care of most other aspects of dev work, compile time is likely to be the limited factor. So we grabbed the Chromium source code and compiled it. M1 Ultra is twice as fast as the M1 Macs and nearly five minutes ahead of the 12900K. That's more than 20% faster. I'm not sure that platform differences alone would really make that much of a difference, but the devs can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here. I can picture them now just typing out angry comments in their WAN hoodies and dad hats from LTDStore.com. Huh, majestic. Now for Apple Silicon's bread and butter, video editing. Final Cut Pro allows for timelines with up to 24 simultaneous raw streams on M1 Ultra before any frames drop in our multicam test, which is such ludicrous performance that it's tough to imagine how you would even fully utilize it. That's the magic of fixed function hardware. What's more, our DaVinci Resolve timeline rendered out in a little under five and a half minutes on the M1 Ultra, which while not quite double the performance of M1 Macs, is still a huge improvement. It's over 25% ahead of our PC bench here. Video encoding, however, is rough, thanks to the magic of that fixed function hardware. See, on Flowplane, you can download videos directly. And when I did that with our Mac Studio unboxing on short circuit, both Apple's own compressor and the third-party app Handbrake failed, but only while encoding the H.264 codec. Compressor falls back to the CPU without a word and takes forever, while Handbrake just errors out. It turns out that Apple's H.264 compression engine and Nvidia's NVENC, to be fair, doesn't support our two-to-one aspect ratio. If I scale the consumer 4K during the transcode instead, it works just fine. Performance-wise, this is worse than a straight transcode, but it is still somewhat favorable against Nvidia. What's really a head-scratcher for me is that the cheaper M1 Macs pulls ahead in both H.264 and H.265 encoding for reasons I struggle to comprehend. I retested this at least a dozen times, and here we are. To Apple's credit, ProRes is probably a more common target for transcodes from RAW, especially given the timeline performance we saw in Final Cut. But ProRes encoding time isn't materially better between any of our Macs. Wait, what? No, M1 Ultra is clearly several seconds faster than the Macs. What am I talking about? Well, okay. ProRes is more limited by how fast the SSD can write than how fast the encoder is. Our ultra-equipped Mac Studio and our MacBook Pro both have one terabyte of storage, while our base model M1 Macs-equipped Studio has a 512 gig module. The bigger SSDs boast much better write performance in most scenarios, and the difference in ProRes encoding performance roughly corresponds to the difference in write speeds across a Morphous Disk Mark. Moral of the story, avoid the base tier storage option if you want the best possible performance out of your Mac Studio. There's a reason why the M1 Ultra comes with a terabyte by default. Moving on to Creative Cloud, while most of PugetBench can run natively on Apple Silicon, the Photoshop plugin needs to run via Rosetta. Accordingly, we get overall poor performance in Photoshop here, but After Effects and especially Premiere are way better. They're out ahead of the PC bench to pull one of the highest scores that I have ever seen. In fact, even the M1 Macs is out ahead in this test too, which tells me that Apple's decoders are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Now we need to talk thermals. The cooler design of the Mac Studio differs between the M1 Macs and M1 Ultra, with the latter getting a copper rather than aluminum heatsink, a difference that makes the Ultra two pounds heavier. In both cases, the heatsink is attached to the same thermal module that handles cooling for the entire machine. Testing thermals turned out to be another difficult task. Blender alone wasn't cutting it, so instead I turned to Stress NG, a cross-platform stress test suite that has native Apple Silicon support through Brew. These are the parameters that I found stress the CPU the most. Add in Gooseberry at 3000 samples to hit the GPU as well, and you've got yourself an Apple coder. I'm not sure if anyone outside of Apple has pushed M1 Ultra to quite these temperatures before. This is a mostly synthetic and highly unreasonable load, but the copper cooler design is more than capable of handling it. Yes, the hottest CPU cores are in the mid to high 90s, but the hottest GPU clusters and memory sensors are nowhere near that, meaning the SoC itself is comfortable. Not only that, but the fans only ever ramped up to around 50% throughout the entire run. Not bad, though I bet we could push the GPU a little harder if we had a dedicated Apple Silicon native stress test. The M1 Max by comparison fares a bit better in terms of raw heat output, but we knew that already. While the hottest core sensor does slowly creep up past the 90 degree mark, that aluminum heatsink is more than adequate. Sensors elsewhere in the package show downright cool thermals by PC standards, and this time the fans never spun up much faster than they did at idle. With results like that, like how much power could they possibly be drawing with this load? To get a good idea, we're using a power meter at the wall. It's worth noting that we've seen at least three different power supply designs from Apple at this point, which means efficiency will differ very slightly between each design. Is there a best one? That's a question for LTD Labs later. For now, we can see the idle consumption for the M1 Ultra is a measly 10.8 watts with the M1 Max at 8.7, just a little more than an LED light bulb. This is why the idle thermal output for both models is incredibly low and makes Max Studio actually a pretty good fit for hotter climates. It's worth putting into perspective how little power is being used here despite the load I hit them with. The idle wattage of our Intel bench was just two thirds of the full load reading on the M1 Max. At full bore, it pulled 10 times that with CPU cores at a hundred degrees under our Noctua NHD 15S. True, even Apple's best GPU doesn't come near the raw performance of this top-end PC hardware, but the M1 Ultra racked up over 80% of the PC bench's performance in overall productivity at 34% of the power draw at full load. The M1 Max is even more efficient at 57% of the PC's performance while drawing just 15% of the power under full load. In a world where PC power consumption just creeps ever upward, this is a breath of fresh air. Fresh, smog-less air. All this in a machine with the same footprint as the Mac Mini, only about twice as tall. Admit it, that's impressive for such a small boy. And it's not all for cooling and power either. The addition of Front I.O. was a welcome one when I unboxed the Mac Studio on short circuit. And with those type C ports doubling as Thunderbolt 4 ports on the M1 Ultra, there's a frankly ridiculous amount of Thunderbolt on display here. Meanwhile, 10G Ethernet as standard doesn't need anything special to work. And this tells me that Apple knows what their professional customers need. But Apple has always been hesitant to provide their customers with what they want. And it's finally time to talk expansion and repairability. Or lack thereof. We know by now that getting into the Mac Studio is a bit painful. That ring on the bottom will probably never look the same again, unless you're careful. But that's not the bad part. It's the SSD. You can learn more about our findings in this previous video, but the TLDR is that these modules are not SSDs in the traditional sense, but rather only contain raw NAND chips. The storage controller is integrated into the M1 series SoCs themselves and is simply programmed from the factory. Why can't you just swap or even rearrange them even with a factory reset? Well, Apple has created a de facto allow list by only supporting the specific combinations they're selling. This because Apple says so thing isn't new. I upgraded my 2011 MacBook Pro with the WiFi module from the continuity supporting 2012 model, but couldn't use it without a hack. Specifically because Apple never shipped that configuration with that model. It has the drivers, didn't bother loading them. It's just, hey, you can't use it. But as mad as that makes me, consumers have come to expect this kind of limitation from Apple Silicon by now. So at the end of the day, it all boils down to performance and lasting power. Will the Mac Studio and M1 Ultra be relevant in the next five to 10 years? Honestly, I'm not so sure. The greatest irony with the M1 Ultra is that the one thing that it's really, really good at is also the one thing that M1 Max is already really, really good at, video editing. Unless you absolutely need access to 128 gigs of memory or you do a lot of VFX work, chances are you'll never fully appreciate the extra power that it affords you until it's already obsolete. If your use cases are covered by the few exceptions like compilation and resolve, then M1 Ultra is great. Otherwise, wherever it's not within spitting distance of M1 Max, it's still matched or outmatched by PCs that cost the same or less. Now this could be a optimization thing that Apple will just have to deal with in the future with additional updates to Swift and Xcode, but for now, that's just the reality. As for the Max Studio itself, like M1 Ultra, it's impressive, but as excited as I was when it was announced, thank you, Apple. Now I'm not sure I get the point. It lacks peripherals and a display, and it shares many of Apple Silicon's current limitations like the lack of 48 gigabits per second HDMI output. If you buy Apple's matching peripherals, the cost of owning even the base model works out to be more than a MacBook Pro with the same specs and anchors it to a desk. A MacBook Pro with the same SoC can drive the same studio display, has the same HDMI output, and has the same card reader. You can bring a MacBook's I.O. up to speed with a dock too. This one not only provides more connectivity than the Max Studio would have with a studio display, but it costs $400 and also supports audio-video bridging, something that I'm told Apple Silicon's LAN ports dropped support for, but is critically important for broadcast work. The total cost of a MacBook Pro with this dock remains well below that of the studio setup. Even if you got the 16 inch model. Max Studio's only saving grace is that you don't have to buy the studio display or magic peripherals. Apple just expects you to. We'll have them linked down below just in case. And this really is the overall theme here. Apple expects you to want the M1 Ultra. You probably don't. Apple expects you to think that the Max Studio is a good value. It's really not. What it is, is a uniquely compact, efficient, and surprisingly powerful machine, but with a price tag to match, and without matching the PC competition in terms of performance in most workloads. If it aligns with your priorities, then great. I can't tell you not to shell out for it. If your priority is value, then Apple has trapped themselves into a corner with how ludicrously good the 2021 MacBook Pros already are. And those even come with MagSafe. Just like this video comes with a segue to our sponsor. 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Go check out our investigation on the Mac Studios SSDs for a little more context into what's going on there. Apple Silicon really is a new frontier, for better or for worse.