The Mac Studio
with Apple's new M1 Ultra Chip is a super powerful device,
but it also costs 4,000 US dollars
which is six times more expensive than it's younger brother,
the M1 Mac Mini, which comes in at $699.
And this begs the question,
is the Mac Studio six times more powerful
than the M1 Mac Mini?
In this video, we are going to compare them
in everything from port selection, coding,
creative workflows, 3D modeling, gaming and more.
So these devices are obviously aimed
at different target markets.
The Mac Mini is just a great all round entry level computer,
whereas the Mac Studio is aimed more at professionals.
Is this going to be a fair comparison?
Absolutely not, but it's still fun to compare the two.
Alright, so let's have a quick chat
about ports first of all.
Now, I won't go into too much detail
cause there's not a massive difference between the two.
One thing I will say is that I personally ran out of ports
on the Mac Mini very, very easily.
So you only have two thunderbolt ports
on the back on the Mini versus four on the Mac Studio
and another two thunderbolt ports
and also an SD card on the front.
And this is such a big difference in my opinion
because you'll notice the lack of IO options
on the Mac Mini.
So if you want to plug anything into this device,
you have to somehow feel around and plug it into the back.
And you also get a 10 gigabit Ethernet port
built into the Mac Studio, and this is also available
on the Mac Mini, but for an extra $100.
The dimensions are obviously quite different
and the M1 ultra Max Studio is much heavier
due to the copper heat sink inside it.
But both of these devices are going to be sitting
on your desk the entire time
so I don't think weight really matters all that much.
Okay, let's start with some synthetic benchmarks
for the CPUs.
Starting with Cinebench,
there was of course a significant difference
between both devices.
The Mac Studio was three times faster
which makes sense because it has 20 CPU cores
compared to just eight for the Mac Mini.
Although for single core scores,
there was barely any difference.
Again, this makes perfect sense
because they're both running the same M1 Silicon
with the same clock speeds.
So if your workflows consist mainly of single core stuff
so Photoshop files, moving around the view port in Blender,
for example, you may not actually notice
that much of a difference between the two.
So what about programming and coding
for all the developers and software engineers out there?
Well, there is a significant improvement
with the M1 Ultra, but only by around 50% or even less
when considering very complex tasks
such as building WebKit in Xcode.
It seems that even though on paper,
the core count more than doubles,
this doesn't necessarily translate well
to real life workflows.
Okay, so how about creative workflows on a Adobe?
Well, I tried to run the After Effects
PugetBench benchmark on the Mac Mini
but it kept failing due to insufficient RAM.
So if we look at a real life project,
here's a short 2D animation.
The Mac Studio completed it significantly faster
but the Mac Mini kept up pretty well
coming in at just 2.5 times slower.
After Effects is extremely RAM intensive
so a lot of this difference is coming from the fact
that we are really comparing eight gigabytes of RAM
versus 64 gigabytes on the Studio.
We see the same results in Lightroom Classic
and Premier Pro
and you'll all notice the significant difference
in Live Playback and Effects Score
both of which will have the biggest impact
on the editing experience.
Speaking of editing,
let's take a quick look at video editing.
Starting with a Multi-Cam project,
here we have four streams of really demanding 4k footage
from assorted GoPro, Sony and Blackmagic cameras.
And there's actually a ton of really demanding
and high quality footage on this timeline.
And if you want to see this in more depth,
I'll link a video
where I talk about all the different Codex Effects,
color corrections and so forth.
The Multi-Cam timeline is flawless on the M1 Ultra
but is just barely acceptable on the Mini
but improve slightly by bumping timeline resolution
down to 1080p during editing.
So if you had some slightly less demanding footage
or perhaps you transcoded
or proxied one or two streams of footage
the editing experience actually would not be too bad
on the Mac Mini.
And we all know timeline performance
is by far the most important thing when editing
because you spend 95% of your time here
not sitting around waiting for a render to finish.
That being said,
rendering out this 20 minute project in 4k and H.264
there really wasn't that much of a massive difference
even with all the video hardware encoders
and decoders built into the M1 Ultra Chip.
Now, considering this is actually a fairly,
demanding editing workflow.
I think the Mac Mini's actually held up really,
really well here.
And the performance was very, very impressive
compared to this more expensive machine.
So just for fun, I loaded up a two minute timeline
featuring 8K RED Raw Footage
from a RED Camera with minor color correction.
Rendering this out in 8K DNxHR 4:4:4 10-bit.
The difference is more pronounced
as this type of footage is where more powerful systems
really start to pull away from entry level ones.
Moving on to some 3D work.
Blender in particular recently got a massive update
allowing it to use Metal For Cycles Rendering.
The Blender results
between the two are pretty much what you'd expect
with twice the CPU cores
and six times as many GPU cores.
the M1 Ultra was around five to six times faster
in every scene,
except when artificially limited to just the CPU
where it was roughly three times faster.
I also threw in the Teapot render from Octane X
which gave similar results.
and that being said,
you probably won't go for an Apple Silicon Mac
if you're doing complex 3D rendering
and modeling for example,
but it's still interesting to see
how the GPU actually scales fairly linearly here.
Okay, so what about gaming?
Sure.
You probably won't be doing much gaming on either machine
due to poor optimization
and lack of support for most game APIs
but we can still compare the two.
Starting with GFX Bench, there's a noticeable difference
about the same as what we were seeing
in the blended GPU renders.
This is the same with the Metal GPU score on Geekbench
and in real life the exact same differences
can be seen visually
when comparing a game like Shadow of the Tomb Raider
at 1080p ultra settings.
Looking at SSD speeds,
they were actually fairly similar between the two
when looking at Read Speed
but the Max Studio with its base one terabyte SSD
does see a large boost in Write Speeds.
Now Apple does market the Max Studio
as having a really, really fast SSD.
But the reality is you only get those speeds
if you upgrade the SSD to something like a four terabyte
or eight terabyte option.
Now let's have a quick chat about some of the fan noise
and thermal differences between the two.
Now, if you guys are a fan of the channel
you would know I'd generally like to whip out
the FLIR thermal camera,
also do some decimal testing on these machines.
I literally do not need to do that here.
Neither machine gets hot.
Neither machine makes any fan noise
even fully when under load.
And they're just an amazingly quiet
and cool machine to have on your desk,
especially coming from say a windows machine
with an Intel i9 or an RTX 3080.
Yes of course that's more powerful in other areas
but just being able to sit down and never hear this machine
or never have the room heat up is amazing.
And there's really no differences
between the two in that regard.
Now, in terms of power draw,
it is obviously increased on the M1 Ultra Max Studio
but not as much as you'd think.
Okay, so there was a clear winner in this video
in terms of performance.
And it definitely was not the Mac Mini
but I have to say I'm extremely impressed
with how well this machine actually kept up
with this Mac Studio, which is six times more expensive.
You know, if we look at a number of different workflows
such as coding and development,
so doing that WebKit build also editing
that particular 4k Multi-Cam timeline
and also some After Effects renders.
I mean,
this was only about two to two and a half times slower
than this machine despite being six times less expensive.
And considering that this machine is 18 months old,
at this point,
and it's holding up this well to a $4,000 brand new machine,
I think that's pretty much the best bang for buck
you can get in terms of Max right now.
Anyway guys, hopefully you enjoyed this video
apart from that, I'll catch you in the next one.