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00:00Hey guys, I'm Tom the Tech Chap and this, well that, is the new Mac Studio.
00:04Obviously right now all the hype is around the new Apple Vision Pro headset but that's not for
00:09everyone, it's not coming till next year and right now it's actually this, the new Mac Studio that
00:14I'm most excited about. The thing is you never know if you're going to get a review sample from
00:27Apple and if you do there's no telling what spec you're going to get. So I unboxed this,
00:31set it up and then I had a look at the specs and my jaw dropped a little bit.
00:36This is a maxed out Mac Studio. Literally if you spec out every option, M2 Ultra with the 76 core
00:42GPU, all 192 gigabytes of unified memory and of course 8 terabytes of storage because external
00:48SSDs are for losers, that's the one I have here. All £9,000 or $8,800 of Mac Studio which is
00:56insane but of course you don't have to spend that much. The Mac Studio starts at around £2,000
01:01which gets you the M2 Max and actually at that point if you are considering the entry level
01:05maybe even consider the Mac Mini with an M2 and save a lot more money as well.
01:10But Mac Mini versus Mac Studio is a question for another video. Today I just want to see what this
01:14specced out M2 Ultra monster is capable of because this is the first time we've seen this new chip
01:20which is essentially two M2 Max's glued together. Apple call it Ultra Fusion but I'm pretty sure
01:25it's just superglue and so we're talking double the CPU, double the GPU and double the neural
01:30engine cores plus double the medium encoder and decoders. So we're talking 134 billion transistors
01:36with the M2 Ultra versus 67 billion with the M2 Max and also this can come with up to 192 gigs of
01:41memory versus 96. So in theory the M2 Ultra should be around twice as fast as the M2 Max. Now sadly
01:47I don't have a Mac Studio with the Max to test that out right now. I only have this one Ultra
01:52sample from Apple but what I do have is this a MacBook Pro 16 with an M2 Max and 64 gigs of
01:59memory and while it's not obviously a like for like because that's a desktop this is a laptop
02:04and so of course there are thermal and cooling advantages with this. Also it has way more RAM.
02:08You can technically get this with 96 gigs. I've got 64 here but I am still curious just how much
02:14faster this M2 Ultra is and as this is my workhorse, my everyday laptop and basically the most
02:19powerful MacBook Pro you can buy, I'm kind of curious how much faster is the Mac Studio or is
02:24this good enough? Well let's fire up some benchmarks and put it to the test and starting with the
02:29Blender benchmark the M2 Ultra is literally twice as fast and so straight away if Blender is your
02:35program of choice for you or your business maybe the Ultra is worth it. Now if you're regular on
02:40the channel you know that Premiere Pro is more my gig and yes I know I should switch to Filecut
02:44or DaVinci Resolve. I know I know but you're not my mother you can't tell me what to do and to be
02:48fair it is still the case that much of the professional editing industry do still use
02:51Premiere Pro and in the Puget benchmark we're looking at anywhere between a 35 and 75 optic
02:58with the M2 Ultra with the biggest increase coming from the GPU and then in terms of exporting a
03:03video I've got my 10-minute 4k 60 h.264 project here and exporting with the YouTube 4k preset
03:09max depth max render settings of course my MacBook Pro took 7 minutes and 27 seconds whereas the
03:14MacStudio took 5 minutes and 24 seconds and it stayed nearly silent the whole time whereas my
03:20MacBook fans war up and get quite noisy. Jumping over to Lightroom and the MacStudio was around 40%
03:26faster converting and exporting 100 raw photos to JPEG and then in Photoshop a simple focus
03:31stacking with a couple of 12 megapixel photos was around 75% faster on the MacStudio. Now bear in
03:37mind I'm not editing 8k footage here I'm not working with gigapixel images or anything crazy
03:42like that but even with my workloads I'm seeing some pretty significant speed increases. Now
03:46obviously for me focus stacking that takes three seconds versus one and a half seconds or something
03:51doesn't save me a whole lot of time but if you're working with much bigger files and you're doing
03:54it every day then those 50, 75, 100% speed increases really will add up. Switching gears and booting up
04:01a bit of Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p with maxed out settings the MacBook Pro with M2 Max
04:07averaged 105 FPS while the MacStudio with the M2 Ultra averaged 144 FPS so around a 37%
04:14uptake there but it was also dead quiet throughout. And finally in Geekbench 6.1 the single core score
04:22is practically the same but it is a good 50% faster in multi-core and also the OpenCL graphics
04:27tests. But again this is testing a desktop essentially versus a MacBook so it's not a
04:32like-for-like and apples-to-apples if you will comparison and if you are a 3D visual artist or
04:37movie editor or game designer or you do actually have 22 streams of 8k ProRes that you want to
04:41play back simultaneously in Final Cut as Apple like to demonstrate then you are definitely going
04:45to be at home here. For me that's a little bit excessive but I do definitely appreciate the
04:49faster export times or the faster warp stabilizing in Premiere and I can have every app and program
04:54and probably a thousand Chrome tabs all open and running at the same time without this thing even
04:59breaking a sweat. And if you do have very deep pockets then you can get up to 192 gigs of memory
05:04with this. The M2 Max tops out at 96 and also the memory bandwidth is doubled from 400 to 800
05:10gigabytes per second. The M2 Ultra also gets double the RAM and storage as standard and also
05:14the front ports here are actually a little bit better. They're both Thunderbolt with the M2 Ultra
05:19whereas on the M2 Max these guys are just 10 gigabits per second USB-Cs. And the other advantage
05:24when it comes to the displays you're using is the M2 Ultra can output up to six 6k displays at 60
05:30hertz simultaneously whereas the M2 Max supports just four 6k 60 displays. Probably not something
05:36you're going to have to worry about. The downsides of the M2 Ultra are one is that it's heavier this
05:40is 3.7 kilograms versus 2.6 so it is noticeably denser but I'm not quite sure how often you're
05:46gonna be moving this thing around and you can still carry in a backpack. The biggest issue of
05:50course is the price. The Max Studio starts from $2,000 or 2,100 pounds with an M2 Max but if you
05:57opt for the M2 Ultra chip it adds another 1,500 although that does also double the RAM and storage
06:03which are usually around 250 each as individual upgrades. So I reckon this is probably the spec
06:08I would go for if I wanted to spend 4,000 pounds or so on a new Max Studio. And I get it it is easy
06:14to roll your eyes and just be like a classic Apple when you talk about those kind of prices but this
06:18is not for the average person that is the Mac Mini that is the MacBook Air. This is a high-end
06:23prosumer slash professional workstation. If you are on a tighter budget and don't need quite that
06:29performance then still definitely consider the M2 Mac Mini and then at the opposite end of the
06:33spectrum we have the new Mac Pro desktop and comes with an M2 Ultra as standard and the main advantage
06:39with that is we get PCIe 4 expandability whether it's storage or networking or media cards whatever
06:44you like although expandable storage does sound nice. Obviously you can't upgrade this once you
06:48buy it except for well hooking up external SSDs or maybe connecting to a NAS drive. Speaking of
06:54which I also appreciate how many ports we have with this thing. Six Thunderbolt 4s, we have a 10
06:59gigabit ethernet, two USB A's, a UHS-II SD card reader, headphone jack and new for this year as I
07:05say we have Wi-Fi 6e and HDMI 2.1. So in this setup I've got the 27 inch 5k Apple Studio display which
07:14is very nice it's got the nano etched glass and also the height sound adjustment which is all
07:20horribly expensive this is like two grand all in and it is only 60 hertz which is frustrating coming
07:25from my 120 hertz ProMotion MacBook Pro but that is again a conversation for another video. Here I
07:29just have a single Thunderbolt 4 cable nice and easy but a lot of monitors I like to use that are
07:34high resolution and high refresh use HDMI they may not have a Thunderbolt port and so previously with
07:39the HDMI 2 port on last year's Mac Studio I was limited to 4k 60 now with this 2.1 or technically
07:45what Apple are calling the enhanced HDMI it now supports 4k at 240 hertz or 8k at 60. All this
07:52from this little incredibly dense box picking it up it does feel a bit like a brick a very smooth
07:58beautifully rounded brick but the footprint isn't that much bigger than my hand. I've also had this
08:02for a little under a week now and most of the time it's been completely silent only once or twice
08:07during benchmarks I heard the slightest fan noise but it was barely noticeable and it does
08:11also have a speaker built in which is handy for the boot up sounds and as a backup if you have
08:15nothing else. So despite its very unassuming appearance this is a monster in terms of
08:22performance and really it is overkill for the vast majority of us. I think if you can utilize it and
08:27if you can afford it it's a great option and looking at Intel and AMD and Nvidia rivals how
08:32often do we get a 50 to 100 boost in performance with a new chip? Probably not worth the upgrade
08:38if you have last year's Mac Studio or a recent MacBook Pro but if you've owned anything older
08:42or heaven forbid you're still on an Intel powered Mac then stop what you're doing and buy that or
08:48something similar. But what do you reckon? Would you be tempted to buy something like this and
08:51what would you use it for? Editing, rendering, playing cyberpunk with their proton emulation
08:57and seeing how that goes? Let me know in the comments below. Thank you so much for watching
09:00guys. If you enjoyed this video a like and subscribe would be incredible and I'll see you
09:04next time right here on The Tech Chap.