M3 Ultra vs M4 Max Mac Studio - The TRUTH About Apple's "Monster"

This is the M3 Ultra, Mac Studio, Apple's absolute best and fastest Mac. In this video, I'm going to tell you everything you need to know, including tons of performance tests and charts compared to the M4 Macs. There were a couple of shocking test results that I did not expect to happen. So in terms of whether you should go for this, well, there are actually three scenarios that this thing makes sense, including the one that we do here in the office, so stay tuned for that. But let's get into this crazy comparison. First of all, this thing's $5,500. Yes, I went for the best 24-core CPU, 80-core GPU to see the best of the best of what Apple has to offer. So it's very expensive, over two times more expensive than this thing. This is the $2,700 model. But let's stop all that talk. Let's just get into this comparison. First of all, the only difference on the outside is that the two front ports on the M4 Macs are USB-C, while the M3 Ultra has Thunderbolt 5 on 6 ports. And if you're trying to save money, don't give Apple $1,200 for a 4TB SSD. This is a DIY custom build that I did for $500. 4TB is actually faster than the internal storage, which is insane, utilizing Thunderbolt 5. So I did a video on this. I have the links down in this video's description. Now getting right into performance, we have the SSD speeds. And for some reason, the read speed is slower on the M3 Ultra than the M4 Macs. But write speed kind of flips. M3 Ultra is over 1,000 faster. So there's that. Take what you will. Jumping right into CPU performance, we have Geekbench 6 and single core. Of course, because the M3 Ultra has older gen cores, you have a lot slower single core performance. Believe it or not, the M4 Macs is 26% faster, which is actually very interesting because that translates to snappier performance in Speedometer 3.0, which is basically like a web browsing snappiness benchmark. So the M4 Macs is going to be the most snappy. But there are web-based apps like Figma Web Design. And here we have a project from 500designs, one of the best design studios based out of California. The M4 Macs is the winner by a good chunk. For some reason, the M3 Ultra wasn't even that much faster than the M2 Ultra. Of course, the reason you get one of these ultra chips is not for single core, it's for multi-core. So looking at Geekbench, the M3 Ultra is barely faster. The M4 Macs is pulling its weight because of those much faster cores and the way that Geekbench kind of redesigned their multi-core test. But before I get into the real-world CPU test, I want to jump into graphics with Geekbench's metal test. And here you can see that yes, the M3 Ultra with its crazy 80 cores is by far the fastest Mac ever, 250,000 points, but honestly, it has double the cores of the M4 Macs and it's not that much faster, especially if you go over to Steel Nomad Lite, which is kind of like a gaming benchmark. The M3 Ultra, once again, is not that much faster than the M4 Macs. You're not getting your money's worth with the M3 Ultra just yet. Same thing for Solar Bay. Yes, it's faster, but not over double the price faster. Now, 3D rendering is going to be a difference, but I do first want to get into the biggest and most important test, which is Cinebench 2024, the 10-minute stress test. And here we do actually see that over 50% faster or higher score on the M3 Ultra compared to the M4 Macs. Now that is really impressive and that is where it's actually worth probably spending that much more cash, but I got to give it to the M4 Macs because it literally beat the M2 Ultra with less cores. The only problem is power usage because the M3 Ultra uses a ton of power, 103.67 watts peak. That's over 60% higher than the peak of the M4 Macs. Of course, that's because it has so many cores, and they're pushing about 3.56GHz peak load onto those cores across the entire 10-minute test. The M4 Macs does clock in a little bit higher at 3.89GHz, but it has fewer cores so it doesn't use as much power. By the way, with the new M3 Ultra, the MX Power Gadget app that I used didn't show anything at all, so I had to get Acetop installed, and thankfully, TG Pro, the developer of that app, helped me out by sending a beta version to get the temps showing properly, so thank you, I'll leave a link down below. But here, the M4 Macs hit 100 degrees Celsius compared to only 85 on the M3 Ultra, which is super impressive and keeps it so cool. Well, it's because we actually tore down the M2 Ultra Mac Studio and revealed that it has a HUGE copper heatsink specifically for the Ultra chip models, while the Macs use an aluminum heatsink which doesn't work as well for getting rid of heat, so no issues at all with thermal throttling. I also tested the fan speed. By the end of the 10-minute test, this thing only hit 1500RPM on the fans, so I could literally barely hear it, putting my ears up to it, I had to put them up to the back of the grill to actually hear the fans over my, basically, ventilation noise. And now moving on to something different, we have Logic Pro Music Production, and this one actually blew my mind. The M3 Ultra ran 670 tracks without overloading. The M4 Macs did 405. I did not expect this to pull that many tracks. We also tested Xcode 16 benchmark for programmers, and this was actually quite interesting. The M3 Ultra took 67, so you're saving 10 seconds with the Ultra compared to the M4 Macs, but you're spending over double the money. Is that worth it? I don't know. You tell me. Here's a test where it actually is worth it, and this shocked me. This is Lightroom Classic, 500 photos that are 42-megapixel resolution. We exported them. I couldn't believe it. 2 minutes and 35 seconds on the M3 Ultra compared to 4 minutes and 13. That's getting close to twice as fast. This test is limited by memory bandwidth. The M4 Macs has 546, the M2 Ultra has 800, the new M3 Ultra has 819, so because of that, you have enough memory bandwidth to not slow anything down so everything can work together and have crazy impressive performance. And this memory bandwidth also matters a lot for running AI work like local LLMs, so if you're into that, you have up to 512 gigs of RAM, which you can use as VRAM, or at least almost all of it, with crazy fast memory bandwidth and pretty impressive, the best graphics performance you can get. So for local LLM work, if you're interested about that, probably watch Alex Zskin's channel. Now moving on to video rendering, 3D rendering, this is Blender's PartyTug project. The M3 Ultra, 20 seconds to render, 27 on the M3 Macs. That is not a difference that you'd want to spend $3,000 more for on the M3 Ultra. Now, of course, we did video editing with Final Cut Pro. This is a 5-minute HEVC export, which is the most common format that most people use, including us. Almost twice as fast on the M3 Ultra compared to the M4 Macs. That's very, very impressive. That's because it has two times more encoders. I also tested our most complex video editing test. This is Canon R5 8K RAW. The M4 Macs was faster than the M3 Ultra. Even though it has less CPU performance, less GPU performance, that's actually really impressive. I did not expect this at all. So with that said, I'm really disappointed that this does not have an M4 Ultra chip because you'd have all of those benefits of the new generation cores. And if it did, it would be a completely different conversation with a completely different conclusion. But with the M3 Ultra, you're gonna have to sacrifice some things, especially for paying double the price. This is just getting really confusing, but let me make it simple for you right now with the three scenarios that are worth it going for the M3 Ultra. Number one is if you want the fastest Mac that you can get and you don't care how much money you spend. And it likely means that you're either making a lot of money with your Mac, with your Mac Studio, or you're wealthy enough not to care about the extra $3,000. Number two is if you do work with local LLMs, and this turns out to be the perfect machine for you to build an AI workstation, likely with up to 512 gigs of RAM, maybe even combining two of these things, or let's say any other workflow that requires as much RAM as you can get, that likely means that you're probably making great money with the Mac Studio. And scenario number three is that if you have a specific workflow that is greatly benefited by the M3 Ultra chip, like let's say video editing like we do here every day at Max Tech where we export at least one or two large videos a day and sometimes we're in a time crunch, or let's say if you're doing massive photo edits in Lightroom all the time, almost on a daily basis, that difference in the Lightroom Classic test was huge, getting close to twice as fast. So if you haven't already noticed where I'm trending towards with my opinion, the big point is that the M3 Ultra is seriously only for people who are making good money with their Mac, or at least hoping that they will start making money with it. And if you're just choosing a Mac Studio for let's say a hobby or a hobby workstation, or because you want a powerful Mac that's future-proofed, seriously DO NOT get the Ultra. The M4 Max Mac Studio is almost as fast in many of the tests that we did, and it's actually faster in a couple of them like web design or being snappier with the higher single core performance, and I guarantee that this will also hold its value better since it's more affordable and has a newer generation chip. Because whenever you buy something luxurious like a $100,000 car, it loses value much more quickly compared to something that's reasonable that a lot of people can afford, so just stick with the M4 Max if you're not gonna be making serious money with your Mac. Spend that money on something else like the SSD right here, $500 for 4TB, it's the best deal if you want Thermal 5 speeds. I'll leave the links down below as well as to these Mac Studios and the MacBook Airs as well so let me know your thoughts and questions if you're trying to decide, just ask below in the comments, definitely subscribe above for more videos, check out those videos right there. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next one!