What kind of computer can you buy with a budget of more than 30,000?
Before the release of the 30 series graphics card and the soaring price of the graphics card, 30,000 yuan can be matched to an i9-10900K+RTX 2080Ti ROG family barrel, I mean even the chassis is used by the sun god, and the RGB light is turned on at night The whole community knows that "3 buildings 803 that guy is playing games again" Kind of family barrel.
But if you're a Mac user, there aren't as many computers to choose from at this price point. In addition to buying a Mac mini or notebook and then frantically upgrading the original SSD, the so-called "Mac mini Pro Max" released some time ago - Mac Studio is obviously your only choice.
Although the appearance of the Mac Studio is somewhat similar to the usual Mac mini, it is a little thicker, and it looks like two Mac minis are stacked on top of each other. But in fact, mac studio is very different from the Mac mini in terms of product positioning. In Apple's product system, the Mac mini, like the iMac with the M1 chip, is a home light computer suitable for the vast majority of people, and in the concept of Windows, it is like a Mac home and educational version.
The Mac Studio is undoubtedly not a "home computer" for home use, and the one that Xiao Lei bought is the standard version of the M1 Ultra model, which contains 20 CPU cores, which can run at single-core 3.2GHz, full-core 3.0GHz, and 48 GPU cores and 32 NPU cores. The memory is 64GB unified memory and equipped with 1TB SSD, the front-end process is full of 64GB of memory space, and the high-speed SSD can also give a cache partition under the scheduling of macOS, even in the face of large projects.
In addition to the core configuration, mac Studio's IO interface configuration has also ushered in a surprising upgrade. Unlike the Mac mini that looked a little stingy before, the Mac Studio's interface is luxurious: the full machine's 6 Thunderbolt 4 (not Thunderbolt) ports allow you to easily connect to various high-resolution displays, such as Apple's XDR, Studio Display or LG's Ultrafine 5K, and the HDMI 2.0 interface can be used to connect to the 4K screen of the conference room.
I know that there will be people who will provoke, saying that the 30,000 yuan computer is not HDMI 2.1, although HDMI 2.0 is indeed a bit unworthy of the identity of Mac Studio, but the ultra-high-speed HDMI cable has higher requirements for the performance of the chip IO, and compared with the HDMI 2.1 interface, the faster and more versatile Thunderbolt 4 is obviously more in line with the actual needs of high-power users.
If the full USB-C interface seems a bit unsatisfactory, but the two USB-A interfaces also provide Mac Studio with "backward compatibility" capabilities, even if you take a USB stick or USB device at the same time, Mac Studio will not be dry eyes.
In addition, it is equipped with a 10 Gigabit Ethernet port, which is very practical for users who use intranet file servers. As for the external Internet, Mac Studio also supports Wi-Fi 6E networks, whether it is an external network or an internal file server, Mac Studio can achieve high-speed access. As for the return of the SD card interface, some photographer friends of Xiao Lei feel very practical, but there are also photographer friends and Xiao Lei who think that the return help of the SD card is actually very limited, after all, a C-C data line can directly read the contents of the two cards of the camera, and at the same time, it can charge the camera for a while.
So how does the Mac Studio perform with the M1 Max? Ray has prepared a series of benchmarks here, so that everyone can have a basic understanding of the performance of Mac Studio.
Cinebench R23
First of all, in CineBench R23, the Mac Studio multi-thread score came to 24168, which has surpassed AMD's first-generation line tear from the data point of view, and the Xeon W-3254M is close, and the effect of multi-core accumulation is still very significant. In terms of single-threading, the Mac Studio scored 1534 points, which is about the same as the 28W i7-1165G7 with 4 cores and 8 threads.
Comparing the multi-threaded and single-threaded achievements of Mac Studio, it is not difficult to see that the "versatility" of M1 has become a performance shortcoming of Mac Studio to some extent. In the Intel camp, there is a significant gap between mobile chips and desktop chips in terms of performance scheduling. But for M1, because the M1 Ultra consists of two M1 Maxes, and the M1 Max is also used in notebooks, even the M1 Ultra cannot show the advantages of a unified architecture in single-core testing. At the same time, the M1 Ultra's single-core main frequency is also slightly inferior to its competitors in the Intel platform, only 3.2GHz, which is why the M1 Ultra's single-thread performance is actually comparable to an 11th-generation i7 with a lock of 28W power consumption.
In Apple's "legacy strength" GeekBench, the Mac Studio has a multicore score of 23697 and a single-core score of 1778, and the difference in scores once again proves the performance gap between M1 Ultra's single-core and multi-core. But to be fair, there are few scenarios in macOS that emphasize single-core performance, and under reasonable performance scheduling, even if the M1 Ultra's L3 cache is only 4MB, it can also play a capability beyond the Intel platform.
In terms of GPUs, OpenCL scored 75441 and Metal scored 90791. From the score point of view, although Apple has repeatedly mentioned at the press conference that its chip can "surpass 3080" in some projects, from the actual performance and Apple's own explanation of which projects its CPU surpasses Intel, the graphics performance of the M1 Ultra is still "partial science student", and the performance beyond 3080 is more reflected in specific areas, such as ProRes acceleration. The game performance that everyone is concerned about is obviously still a bit difficult for Mac Studio.
Leaving aside games, let's look at some tests that are closer to "productivity", and the test of the 3D rendering plugin V-Ray is a more intuitive GPU test. The V-Ray 14857 score looks ok, but the performance of the V-Ray GPU CUDA is very average, and the score of 485 is even less than half of the mobile version of the 3080 in some laptops. As one of the most intuitive indicators of the GPU, the performance of the CUDA core will not only affect the game performance of the computer, but also accelerate the H264 video encoding, and even accelerate the speed of video rendering.
But then again, although the CUDA test performance of the M1 Ultra is average, the ProRes acceleration performance in the M1 chip can make up for the performance shortcomings of the M1 Ultra to a certain extent, and achieve excellent video processing performance in another way.
Rendering test software Blender BenchMark, Monter scene SPM came to 530, but Classroom is only 250, in the rendering of complex scenes, Mac Studio performance is still somewhat short.
However, in the Lightroom photo export test, which is closer to Xiao Lei's usual work, Mac Studio has found its own confidence. 300 photos took 5 minutes and 40 seconds to export, while 30 photos took only 12 seconds to export. For comparison, the M1 MacBook Air took 1 minute and 32 seconds to export in 30 frames, while the hardware-accelerated RTX 3050Ti computer took twice as long as the M1 MacBook Air in 30 shots and more than 15 times as fast as the Mac Studio.
As for the CrossMark test, led by computer brands, Mac Studio scored 1552 overall and the creative score came to 1946.
As for the hard disk that everyone cares about, the read and write speeds in the Blackmagic hard disk test are 5259MB/s and 5678MB/s, respectively, even if the 4K60P video material with a 10-bit color depth of 422 is edited, the Mac Studio's hard disk will not bring a read and write bottleneck.
Then again, from the perspective of hardware, we can indeed put the hard disk of Mac Studio, but from the disassembly video, there is no master chip on the hard disk removed by Mac Studio. In other words, the master controller of the SSD seems to be integrated into the M1 Ultra, and replacing the hard disk in the later stage seems to be impossible, if there is an idea of buying a Mac Studio, it is recommended to leave a sufficient amount of advance when choosing hard disk space.
What if I have to play the game?
Although I've just listed a lot of Mac Studio's performance in terms of work or so-called "productivity", I know that there must be people who only have games in mind. So can the $30,000 Mac Studio be bought home to play the game?
Let's start with the results, yes. But there are far fewer games to play than windows computers.
The easiest way to know what games your Mac can play is to open Steam and filter macOS-enabled games according to system support, and Steam's macOS client also has a special macOS filter button that can only display games in your own game library that can run under macOS. In Xiao Lei's own situation, the Siege of Cailiu is obviously not playable, but the FF14 and LOL external servers have launched macOS clients, and CSGO and War Thunder also have macOS versions.
Although there is CSGO on macOS, from the actual operation effect, it seems that it is not a good idea to use Mac Studio to play CSGO. Although Xiao Lei has reduced the resolution to 1080P, the average frame rate in the test map is only about 100FPS, and the actual game is more likely to come to about 80FPS.
If you want to play, it's not impossible, but if you're just playing games, a budget of 30,000 yuan can already buy a good gaming computer, a PS5 and a 4K game TV. Doing the right job with the right computer is what really smart users do.
summary
From the basic performance test, the Mac Studio or M1 Ultra is indeed worth the $30,000 price, but only if your "job" happens to be the type that Mac Studio is "good at", such as video editing or photo editing. From another point of view, this may also be the reason why most of the evaluation videos of Mac Studio on Station B are used to cut videos. For users who can use the performance of Mac Studio, such as video teams, Mac Studio can indeed significantly compress the video production cycle, and for these users, time is actually money.
Just like the person who bought the F150 Raptor definitely has more than one pickup truck at home, the user who spent 30,000 yuan to buy a Mac Studio definitely has more than one Mac Studio computer on the table. From Ray's own point of view, there are times when I myself do not agree with part of Apple's promotion of the M1 chip. Take this Mac Studio as an example, in terms of publicity, Mac Studio seems to be an omnipotent performance monster. But whether in DX support, HyperV virtualization support or even H265 video support, Mac Studio has shown its own shortcomings, and only after actually using it, users will discover the true side of Mac Studio.
I don't mean to say that Mac Studio is "out of the box and out of the way", after all, in my workflow, Mac Studio can significantly compress the time I wait for and shorten the production cycle of the entire project. But the real Mac Studio is far from the all-rounder that Apple advertises. The performance of Mac Studio allows Mac users to do their original work with greater efficiency, but only to the original work. For some things that the Mac could not do, Mac Studio is still helpless.
Mac Studio is a more powerful Mac, but Mac Studio is still just a Mac.