the m1 max max max the m1 max max
mac studio i i'm gonna have to rewrite
this i edit a lot of video that might be
kind of obvious judging by the fact
you're watching this video so last year
i bought the m1 mini to replace a 16
inch intel i9 macbook pro and that
upgrade was incredible i went from
spinning beach balls and loud fans all
the time to blissful silence and
fewer spinning beach balls apple's m1 is
power efficient but in the first
iteration it was only marginally faster
in certain conditions than the high-end
intel chips and replaced i mean it was
30 faster than my old machine
recompiling linux but it was also slower
for some tasks but then came the m1 pro
and m1 max but they were only available
in laptops since i don't travel much
these days i've been rocking a small
macbook air for light work and an m1 mac
mini with 10 gig ethernet for my main
workstation but after the apple studio
was announced i bought it right away and
well it came today even though my mini's
performance wasn't that restrictive this
studio blows it away instead of four
efficiency cores and four performance
cores i have two efficiency cores and
eight performance cores i'm going from
16 gigs of ram to 64. i upgraded from
two terabytes of storage to four and
it's got more gpu cores more i o ports
including my favorite thing this little
card reader built into the front and
when i first pulled this thing out of
the box i thought to myself you look
like deep thought you know that ai from
hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy anyways
speaking of the box that thing is some
sort of origami nerd's dream i'm not
sure apple had to go to the lengths they
did with the packaging but at least my
wife was impressed by the paper sleeve
the computer was wrapped in she said and
i quote it's like a really premium paper
towel
nice job apple i guess that's what a
four thousand dollar paper towel feels
like while i'm at it the power cord is
also sleeved in some sort of fabric and
it's nice and springy and i don't really
know how to describe it basically it
doesn't get all kinky like my other
power cables that that didn't come out
right none of this really matters unless
the computer can do stuff better the
first thing i was wondering is how loud
these fans are most of the inside of
this thing is the new cooling system and
if i put it on my desk i don't want to
hear fan noise all day and luckily apple
did a pretty good job it's not silent
like my m1 mini seems to be but it's
nearly so it's definitely right around
the noise floor of my office like maybe
28 or 30 decibels and i never heard it
ramp up even after a couple hours of
benchmarking i just hope it doesn't get
clogged up with dust on this intake on
the bottom if i ever want to clean it up
for a good cleaning it looks like
according to ifixit you have to remove
this entire rubber ring on the bottom
just to access the four screws
at least it can be open still i wouldn't
put it past apple to weld one of these
things shut if they could get away with
it now i chose the max version and not
the ultra that means it's not bleeding
edge it doesn't have two maxes welded
together with ultra fusion or anything
fancy like that but i think most people
who buy the studio will probably go for
the max like i did since the price is a
bit more down to earth especially since
apple charges an arm and a leg plus a
kidney or two for their ssd upgrades but
the headline feature for me since i edit
video is the built-in prores encode
decode engines and that's already a
massive upgrade even on this mid-tier
studio but those who watch this channel
know i just built my first pc in years
an all amd ryzen 5600 x build with an rx
6700xt
not sponsored and part of the reason i
built that machine was to have a faster
way to recompile linux when i'm
experimenting on the raspberry pi so my
question is can this mac studio i bought
recompile linux faster than my new amd
pc and the answer is
no it's just a tiny bit slower for my
raspberry pi compiles the mac studio i
bought finishes in 375 seconds compared
to 363 seconds on the ryzen machine
that's not a huge difference of course
we're talking about three percent and
all in that ryzen machine cost around a
thousand bucks not including the
graphics card the mac studio starts at 2
000 so it should be faster right well it
is sometimes like when editing video
especially in prores it's a monster and
in some benchmarks like geekbench it
soundly beat the ryzen 5 with its piddly
6 performance cores in fact both my m1
max seem to score higher on geekbench
for a single core with both macs scoring
in the 1700s versus about 1600 for the
ryzen and just for fun i ran cinebunch
on all three machines and here are those
scores the mac studio was just a tiny
bit faster than the ryzen in this test
though marquez from mkbhd said the ultra
score is just above 24 000 so if
benchmarks are what you're after the m1
ultra is the chip for you i also wanted
to measure how efficient each computer
was using a kilowatt i measured the
ryzen desktop and the mac studio at idle
and while running cinebench r23 the mac
studio idles at 6 watts while the pc
idle is at 39 that's 6 times more power
consumption granted you can build pcs
with components that are better at idle
power consumption but most higher end
intel and amd cpus eat up a lot more
idle power and when i ran cinebench the
delta was still huge the ryzen cpu
boosted the power consumption of the
system up to
151w continuous while the max studio
consumed only 38. the studio is four
times more efficient under load and six
times more efficient at idle
many benchmarks was close but if it's
four times less expensive to power the
beast the mac studios a better value as
an always-on workstation at least for me
but i don't put a ton of stock into
synthetic benchmarks what matters most
is what you can do with your computer
and in my case this mac studio is the
perfect blend of price and performance
for a mid-tier video editing workstation
it's tiny and almost silent
but the ryzen pc it's also great i can
do tons of hardware testing and it can
run pretty much any game i want to play
i can't open up halo infinite on the mac
now can i now the other interesting
opportunity this brings up is the fact
that until i sell my old mac mini i can
do some fun experiments on it one thing
i'm planning on doing very soon is
installing asahi linux which is a build
of linux specifically tailored for m1
max with apple silicon and just this
weekend the team behind it announced
their first alpha release so let me know
in the comments if you want me to test
that first or get back to some pi gpu
testing i'm kind of excited for both oh
yeah pi gpus did you know i finally got
that tiny m.2 vga card working on the pi
well sorta there's a lot to discuss and
thanks especially to everyone who's been
helping on github anyways i'm going to
set up the studio using my mac
automation playbook using ansible and if
you want to know how i do that check out
the card up there
and soon i should be getting one of
these a 3u rack mount kit for the mac
studio from my electronics so subscribe
so you don't miss any of these awesome
projects support me on patreon if you
want me to keep doing them and until
next time i'm jeff gearling