Apple's Fastest Mac vs. My $5496 PC

foreign not quite first I have to download those new drivers and I have to delete the trial software that came on my hard drive and I have many manuals to read let me know when it's ready actually the recipe is in some other boxes so I'll meet with you later, some of that unfortunately still holds true today, but what exactly will this Mac vs. PC conversation look like in 2023, which machine is faster, which is more efficient, and most importantly, what does it mean? difference in experience? Answer this question. I actually contacted Apple and said, "Hey, can I borrow one of those new M2 Ultra Max Studios?" They actually responded and shipped an absolute Beast, so this is their

fastest

Mac Studio, while a Mac Mini we'll talk at 10 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores, this can be scaled up to doubling the CPU cores by almost five times the GPU cores and that's basically what we have here. 24 CPU cores, 76 GPU cores, all on a single chip, this one also has 128 gigabytes. of memory that is shared between the CPU and the GPU and we also have four terabytes of storage, those specs bring this closer to seven thousand dollars and by maxing out the memory and storage you can actually get it closer to nine, so that 7K, you know, is like pricing a workstation, someone spends that much money on a desktop system, they want a system that can process basically anything, but I already have one of those and this is my workstation Super Overkill with liquid cooling that I use for absolutely everything you can think of. like Mac Studio M2 Ultra but only a PC, it includes an RTX 4090, a ryzen 7800 Custom hubs and a low profile pump and completely custom cables and that brings me to the first point, oh my goodness, that thing is heavy, the Mac Studio, you just unpack it and plug it in and at the end of the day, computers are tools , there's a lot of value in just unboxing something and getting it up and running as quickly as possible now, of course, not all PC builds require as much work to assemble as mine, but even the easiest PC boards out there require a lot of research and compatibility checks, are a far cry from the Apple experience of simply unboxing and pressing the power button, even when you get to the desktop on both machines, there's still some truth to that 2006 Apple commercial. in Mac Studio , I had to do a software update and that's it for my Windows system.

I had to install Windows myself, update the BIOS, then set the correct memory speeds, then install a handful of drivers and also the stack of individual Windows updates, all of which require a hard reset. to each their own, but maybe it's all worth it when it comes to performance. I mean, I really hope so, so the Mac Studio with M2 Ultra costs around seven thousand dollars and my custom PC, on the other hand, costs around five and a half. Now, much of that money has been spent on premium water cooling hardware and a fairly expensive compact case.

Basically, if you don't care about that stuff and have a good computer, you can get the same specs and performance in much longer. larger form factor for about three and a half years in this comparison, although I think it makes a lot more sense, you know, it shows what you need to spend to get at least a similar form factor machine and there's a lot of value in that portability now that I'm not planning on doing any synthetic benchmarks for this test but the new cinebench just came out so I mean of course we have to test it so let's start with the multi threaded CPU test this turns on all the CPU cores and my PC setup gets absolutely assaulted now to be fair I could expect this build with a 7950x which has twice as many CPU cores which would have put us slightly above the M2 Ultra but to be fair, I don't really need that much CPU power for my particular workflow.

It would also be pushing the limits of what you could call it in this small form factor, but even when we compare single-threaded CPU performance, Mac Studio is still a bit faster and yes, single-threaded CPU performance Threading is something I value. a lot of effects and features in certain apps that can only run on a single core, so it's a pretty interesting difference, also interesting although the new cinebench actually has a GPU test and, you know, this is something I don't like. I held back on a personal level. PC, the RTX 4090 that's in that thing is the

fastest

desktop GPU you can buy today, so I was expecting my personal PC to completely dominate the Mac Studio here and in fact we're seeing a four times performance difference , which is huge, in other words, at least in redshift, which is the renderer used, you could do your job in a quarter of the time on the PC or render four times the number of frames.

What interests me the most is video editing. particularly in DaVinci Resolve Studio. I've been using this for a few years now and every time I've updated my main machine I've noticed a small increase in performance, so this is a project I completed a couple of weeks ago and it's over. I'm doing pretty well, some of you may be familiar with this. I will say that in areas of the timeline where I have super intense color grading and particularly a lot of noise removal, I still see that kind of jerking and stuttering when I press play. button so that PC and Mac Studio have fairly similar timeline performance, which is a bit embarrassing.

I was expecting Mac Studio to be a little different here, but both can't seem to keep up, but something I was really interested to see in Mac Studio is how quickly it can stabilize a clip, so video stabilization is considered a Portable clip. Clips that shake or maybe like the panning isn't as smooth as it could be and my PC. build can stabilize this clip in about six seconds, which is really fast, but Mac Studio can do it in 1.6, which is incredibly fast. Now you might be thinking that you know four and a half seconds is a big deal, you know that's not the case. a really big difference, it's actually a big difference because you know when you press the stabilize button you can't do anything else with your PC, you're just sitting there waiting for it to finish, so in Mac Studio you can just press stabilize and basically do this before you can blink and look for the next clip to stabilize yes, that's actually a pretty big increase in workflow speed.

Another thing I was really interested in was mask tracking, so from time to time. There will be a specific area of ​​a clip where you will want to make adjustments. I don't do this very often, but it's something that takes a little time to process and track and yet roughly the same performance between clips. two here about a second faster on Mac what about video exports? Although you know how quickly you can turn a functional project like this into something that can be viewed on YouTube or something that you can test. Surprisingly, Mac Studio is actually a bit. faster than my PC, which is really surprising, something like a five percent difference, but still, the fact that it even beats my Powerhouse of a PC is honestly pretty humbling.

I also quickly played with Final Cut Pro which is Apple's own editing software and Yes, as expected it runs even faster than a result, for example I can have a flawless playback of a clip with the same that previous project with some pretty intense noise removal. There's just no problem learning this software, although it forces you to use Mac hardware. It's just something I don't care much about. Another thing I really wanted to try was Blender. Now this is a 3D modeling software. I'm not going to pretend that I work in Blender a lot. My skills are quite a bit. basic, but occasionally when the project calls for it, I spend quite a bit of time on it and you know, Blender is very GPU intensive, so as a demo, my next video has quite a bit of Blender and This is a really quick animation, it's just two models, about three lights and it lasts about 105 frames, so it looks a little bit like this and yeah, if we were to sit here and render it, we would need to render each frame individually now on my PC. building with the RTX 4090 absolutely destroys this render, it's like there's no challenge at all, on the other hand Mac Studio takes about twice as long, but it gets worse and a bit painful when you enable denoising which is essential for these render unless you just want to increase the count a lot, which in effect makes your renders even longer when you enable noise removal, Mac Studio just doesn't cooperate as the renders take much longer in the time it takes the Mac Studio to fully render one frame and remove noise, plus my PC build can do like seven or eight frames, something else that's definitely worth talking about is gaming, you know, because this thing has a GPU Pretty decent that I haven't tried. the game porting toolkit yet but I tried a few games that as you know are natively supported by Apple as you can just download them and click play so the first game I tried was CS go and this It was a mistake.

Again, it's basically just download and press play on Steam, but in the background it runs on opengl and uses the Rosetta translation layer to do it, so it can run at about 100 frames per second on low 1440p settings, which it doesn't. It seems so bad but the input lag is horrible even after manually disabling mouse acceleration in terminal for my gpro super light. There's just no way this is even close to a playable experience. Then I tried Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which also uses Rosetta in the background and during gameplay. It looked great and the average FPS was pretty decent.

There was constant stuttering and jerking every few seconds. The last game I tried was Fortnite and the experience here actually wasn't bad. Average FPS was 200+. No stuttering. The mouse input actually seemed pretty decent to me as well. I managed a couple of wins, there were occasional texture glitches, but other than that there really aren't any issues now, of course, I'm not going to pretend this is stellar performance, you could get similar numbers here from a mid-range PC, but at least it does. Give me a little hope, especially since connecting a high refresh rate gaming monitor to this is actually very easy, it has an HDMI 2.1 port and can technically handle a 4K 240Hz display, speaking of monitors, this is my first experience with the professional screen. and I was really hoping I wouldn't like this, but yeah, unfortunately, it's really nice to see that the resolution of my timeline, for example, at 5K resolution, is something completely different.

I mean, I was personally happy with my dual 4K setup, but honestly, this has put them at risk. It's a shame that it's still an IPS panel, but I want to say that the colors are brilliant, the contrast is super impactful, much better than my 4K IPS panels, but yes, above all it's that unreal pixel density, which is very nice to see. use, the biggest complaint I have about However, this monitor caps at 60 hertz, which is a shame, you know, the timeline doesn't feel as snappy as I would like, it's a little snappier on my panels 4K 160hz, the image quality, the overall experience I prefer. this screen for editing, but I would love a 120 hertz Pro motion upgrade in the future, but I actually have another complaint: Mac Studio, even with the M2 Ultra, which is the most power-hungry chip they have, is too silent as this thing is. excessively quiet, there is no point in showing you any sound clip or sound test because even with a full charge you will not hear anything from this machine at most, there is like a little hot air coming out of the back, but you can't notice anything from the fan. spin now on the one hand, that's super impressive, to have a machine that's so small, so powerful and basically noiseless, that's kind of next level, but at the same time you know this is the fastest Mac Studio I have.

I wouldn't have minded if Apple let the thing cook a little louder, let the fan spin a little louder, made at least some noise under full load, at least then it could offer a little more cooling potential. However, power consumption and therefore speed is part of this and something I really like is how efficient theApple hardware. The desktop's idle power consumption, for example, makes my new PC look like a piece of garbage and the CPU cores are mind-blowing. efficient even compared to AMD's latest 7000 series, they somehow consume less power and offer more performance on the GPU side, although that is Apple's biggest current challenge.

The performance per watt on the M2 Ultra is actually lower than my 4090 at redshift and again because of how quiet it is. The thing is, the GPU seems to cap out at around 110 watts, so I'd personally love to see Apple push its GPU performance even more aggressively in the next generation or the generation after to really compete with the side. from the PC, so look, I really love this little guy. little machine, it's super awesome and as someone who uses a lot of Apple products on a day to day basis, it was actually super nice to have my desktop system as part of that whole ecosystem, like the fact that I can open notes on my phone and then have it immediately on my desktop was crazy, but also recording a video on my phone and then just throwing it into my editing timeline in like five seconds, that's something I'm very jealous of and honestly, I'll probably never have that with a Windows PC and aside from gaming, you know, let's forget gaming for a second as a mini workstation, the biggest difference between these two devices is the processing performance of the GPU.

I think things like video editing and photo editing. even audio works well, those things are a little better in Mac Studio and I think that's where the lower priced Mac Mini and even the M2 Pro really shine, but the GPU redshift, you know, Blender, there's a big difference there, even if you are someone like that. Me, who dabbles in that a bit from time to time, you're going to be seriously handicapped right now on a Mac versus a PC. It's the difference between doing your job in minutes or hours. Now Apple is letting me keep it. this for a while, I have to return it, but in the meantime I'm going to put it to some serious use and hope to use that 5K Pro screen too.

That thing is an absolute delight, but in terms of full-time production use, yeah, I won't be upgrading from my Beast of a Mini PC anytime soon