 Maxed out Max or Max Max with M1 Max to the max? The 14 inch MaxBook Pro represent double the GPU and media horsepower of the M1 Pro models. But this raises a very interesting question. How can Apple fit that much more power on this same architecture no less into the same chassis? Like for that matter, is there any other advantage to getting out a MacBook Pro with an M1 Max or is it only really useful for video editors thanks to its expanded media engine? The answer may surprise you. I know it surprised me, but it's no surprise that today's sponsor is Jackery. Thanks to Jackery for sponsoring this video. Their Explorer 1500 power station provides a huge 1500 watt hour capacity with up to seven devices charging simultaneously. And it only takes four hours to recharge from zero to 80%. Get 10% off with code LinusTechTips at the link below. We'll see you later. Goodness feet there's no point restoring it. But any questions you have not addressed I will have them answered on my live stream. There's a bunch of opinions Check 62. There's a whole bunch here and 어 Well that's it from me on M1 Max, and Paige is going to reveal the talking points in trying to figure out whether they'reahaha if they wouldn't take so long to figure it out, queen. too little contrast for me, particularly considering the blacked out keyboard that Apple chose for the new generation MacBooks. But this is a matter of taste and I'm sure there are plenty of folks who'd like to see this thing totally stealth instead. There is one major external difference between the M1 Pro and M1 Max though, and that's in the display support. Where the M1 Pro can handle up to two external Pro Display XDRs via Thunderbolt, the M1 Max can handle up to three while also using the HDMI 2.0 port for up to 4K 60 output. That extra flexibility could lead to some impressive battle station setups for professional workloads. You've got the integrated mini LED display, a span of three big displays worth of workspace and a large TV or color calibrated 4K display for output preview. One question that's been asked a lot is whether the Thunderbolt ports could handle an HDMI 2.1 adapter and unfortunately, ours didn't arrive in time for testing these laptops. I'll test them all when we review the 16 inch models, so make sure you get subscribed for that. It's coming soon. How about on the inside? With these machines being otherwise so similar, could Apple also have given them the exact same cooling setup? Remember, the M1 Pro caps out at 16 GPU cores while the M1 Max can double that number and doubles the memory bandwidth, which together are sure to increase the heat output. Let's pop the hood and compare the two. Oh hey, Apple color matched the screws. How thoughtful. And they're the same picture. If I hadn't told you that the space gray was the M1 Max, you wouldn't have been able to tell the difference just by looking at them, unless you looked really closely at that heat spreader. It's just a little bit wider on the M1 Max to cover that chip's larger footprint. Other than that, same fans, same heat pipe, same everything. Given how hot the M1 Pro got, this makes me worry that we'll see some significant throttling with the M1 Max. We'll button everything back up and give it a go, this time with the Zephyrus M16 repping the PC with its Core i9 and RTX 3060 Mobile. First, we'll see if anything changed for the CPU cores on the M1 Max. And predictably, it absolutely did not. None of the M1 Max's CPU scores are appreciably different in Cinebench R23, and this translates over to Geekbench, where we're effectively looking at run-to-run variants. Same deal with Blender, where we're stuck with CPU rendering until Blender 3.1 releases with Metal GPU rendering support sometime in 2022. You don't have to wait that long for our new shirt designs and a new water bottle from lttstore.com though. They're available right now. You may be surprised by these results though, given how much faster the system memory is. I mean, Ryzen would sure love to have memory that fast, but it seems Apple's CPU cores just aren't taking full advantage of it. And based on these results alone, you might not be too impressed by the M1 Max at all. But the CPUs only half the picture. No, we don't have more CPU cores, or even faster CPU cores. But what we do get are more GPU cores and an expanded media engine with double the encoder blocks and double the ProRes blocks. Nowhere would this be more apparent than Final Cut Pro. For this test, we set up a five by five grid of 4K plus ProRes RAW files and set them to appear one by one in the timeline. Then we set Final Cut to stop when it detects a dropped frame. With the original M1 MacBook Pro stalled at it just four streams and the M1 Pro dropped at seven, the M1 Maxes managed 10 and 12, suggesting that the cut down model either has a slightly less capable ProRes engine or the extra GPU cores on the high-end model are picking up the slack. Whatever the case, this is a truly ridiculous number of pixels being processed all at once with no stuttering whatsoever. Like four or seven simultaneous streams is already a lot. But let's say you don't run Final Cut, you're a resolve shop. Well, good news for you too. When rendering to ProRes 422HQ to take advantage of the ProRes blocks, the higher-end model gets scary close to a sub 10 minute mark on a timeline that is stacked with denoising, chroma keying and filtering. Not a bad result. And our timeline's frame rate keeps up too, where we observed as high as 16 FPS for the high-end model scaled by about two FPS for each step down you take from there. The Zephyrus meanwhile, can only roughly match the lower-end M1 Pro. That's a great result. But what if you need to render some 3D assets? Right now, the best solution on Mac is Cinema 4D with the Redshift render. Surprisingly, the jump in performance from the M1 Pro to the lower-end M1 Max is substantial, likely thanks to the doubled memory bandwidth to go along with the extra GPU cores. The higher-end Max gives us nearly a 10 minute render, which seems impressive up until the Zephyrus comes along and smacks it down with a 539. Of course, that is a 16 inch PC laptop, but spoiler for the 16 inch review, the 16 inch M1 Max doesn't do that much better. We were told that the M1 Max could outperform the RTX 3060 or even match the RTX 3080, and Apple calls out Redshift on their product page. So, M1 gotta take the L on this one. Geekbench 2 shows the Zephyrus and its RTX 3060 absolutely pummeling the M1 Max in both render modes, which places the M1 Max's GPU horsepower further behind than Apple had led us to believe. Maybe there's more optimizations that still need to be done for non-video tasks on these GPU cores, or maybe it's just that the media engine was doing all the heavy lifting in our video editing tests. To be clear, it is scaling relative to the M1 and M1 Pro, but it's just not reaching those dedicated GPU levels of performance we kept hearing about. Hmm, maybe they meant games? Yeah, no. Again, we're seeing mostly linear performance improvements across the lineup in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where Feral Interactive's port makes use of Apple's Metal API, but it's not enough to catch up to the Zephyrus, at least not at 14 inches. Few other games use Metal, so it's all downhill from here when we switch over to CS GO, where there's no difference whatsoever between the M1 Pro and Max. Ironically, this time not because it's using OpenGL, but because we've hit a CPU bottleneck at 100 FPS thanks to Rosetta. Since we're looking for more ways the M1 Max can differentiate itself, there's one final ray of hope, the venerable Dolphin emulator, which is native Apple Silicon support via Universal Binary. Unfortunately, Dolphin doesn't yet support the Metal API, but in testing we did discover a number of interesting points to cover. The first head scratcher is that the high level OpenGL render is more performant than the closer to Metal Vulkan API. This may be because Apple never embraced Vulkan, necessitating the use of a third party library called MoltenVK if developers want to support it on macOS. Because Apple deprecated OpenGL several macOS revisions ago, the implementation, while performant, is missing some new features that makes Dolphin think that the GPU might be underpowered. Second, multi-sample anti-aliasing that can be enabled in most games is a huge performance killer on Apple Silicon. It easily takes rendering speed from an impressive double of native speed to just half. Third, some titles like Rogue Squadron 3 depend so heavily on the CPU that they never run at full speed, even at native resolution, just like the original M1. This makes sense though, because the main differentiator between the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max's CPU cores is that there are more performance cores available, and Dolphin doesn't utilize more than a couple at a time. We did get performance data, however, by firing up Super Mario Sunshine at 8x native resolution and an uncapped frame rate to place the burden squarely on the GPU. Bearing in mind that the game is native to 30 FPS, the starting area runs at about 67 FPS on the lower end M1 Max and 77 on the high end. That's a pretty good improvement from the M1 Pro that topped out at 47, with the original M1 taking up the rear at the sub-native 21. Except then we look at the Zephyrus again, and it's a slaughter. That right there is over four times the native frame rate for this game, and nearly double what the best M1 Max can put out. In a laptop that costs a little over half as much at retail. So again, we're seeing differences between the chips, and the performance is objectively good, but we're just not coming up to the performance claims Apple made during their unleashed event, no matter what we do. We're legitimately not sure if this is an optimization problem or if Apple over-promised with cherry picked data, because as we've seen, it's quite difficult to find anything that runs metal on Apple Silicon to take full advantage of the M1 Max. Now let's take a look at thermals for a test we could run. In our M1 Pro video, we focused on the CPU, so we'll be looking at the GPU this time around for the M1 Max by running Redshift. The fact that it hovers around 90 degrees isn't too surprising, but given how much surface area the GPU occupies, the rest of the SoC is also brought up to those temperatures, which indicates that we're probably at the threshold of what the cooler can manage without maxing out the fans. Those only ever got to around 50% speed, so there's definitely still some headroom if you want to max the fans out manually. We'll be doing a more strenuous combined CPU plus GPU torture test when we test out the 16-inch form factor in our next review, so stay tuned to find out by how much. When we look at the flare, it becomes clear that the M1 Max is really pushing the upper limits of the 14-inch chassis cooling capacity, easily hotter than even the CPU tests we did on the M1 Pro chips in our previous review. We're seeing over 50 degrees in the hotspot and well above that exhausting out of the display. The bottom is still within the realm of comfort, and if it's sitting in your lap, chances are the underside's hotspot won't be touching your skin, so points to Apple there. Now let's talk battery. Last time we showed that the M1 Pro's endurance was nothing short of amazing while doing YouTube video playback, easily beating out contemporaries like the Surface Laptop Studio with a literal all-day battery life result. For the M1 Max, we matched all the screens at four ticks of brightness and let them go. This time around, both of the M1 Pro models lasted a little over two hours longer than both of the M1 Max models, so while battery life is still phenomenal at about 20 hours in this test, you do give up a little bit of endurance for the extra horsepower, even when you're not making use of it. Depending on your priorities though, this could be a side grade, a net benefit, or a net loss. A fun fact, this test failed once, and these endurance figures being what they are made that a huge pain. Overall, for an extra $200 for the 24-core variant, M1 Max is not a bad upgrade. It's just difficult to recommend in general unless you've got a need for more than 32 gigs of memory. The extra GPU horsepower and memory bandwidth seem very situational, particularly in light of the dearth of Apple Silicon native applications with metal support. This may change moving forward, but it's a teething pain that's going to hamper these higher-end SoCs for the coming years. Rosetta can only do so much, as we've seen. As such, M1 Max only really shines in high-end video editing as of right now. For everything else, we're looking at something much more akin to the RTX 3050 Ti, much less the RTX 3080 we were promised. 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