Empty Max versus M2 Ultra Max studio is it worth spending an extra two thousand dollars double the price to get the M2 Ultra well I ran a ton of real world benchmarks and I might give you guys all of those results to show you which one you should buy depending on what you do first off the ultra is heavy you got a set the sucker down to hold it to your hands that is because when we took it apart we saw that it has a copper cooler inside of there that weighs a lot more than the aluminum one now also talk about fan noise and temperatures in just a bit now on the outside these things look identical but if you get the M2 Ultra the front two ports here turn into Thunderbolt instead of standard USB type c.
That is a benefit if you want a lot of ports but with that you can also connect eight displays instead of five with the M2 Max now with that if you have something high resolution like an 8K that still gives you more ability have other high-res displays where that is where the M2 Max can be a little bit limited the SSD speeds are also a lot faster on the Because it comes standard with a one terabyte whereas for two grand you have 512 but if you spend an extra 200 bucks you also get that speed which is really nice with that the M2 Ultra comes with 64 gigs of RAM standard you have to have that much whereas with the two thousand dollar model we have 32 gigs that you can upgrade but overall the ultra supports double the RAM for two grand you get a 12 core processor but the ultra comes with a 24 core it's exactly double so you'd expect to get double the CPU performance well in geek bench if we take a look at single core.
I actually got a lower score on the ultra than on the max for some reason and then looking at multi-core performance we have 14 600 compared to twenty thousand seven hundred and if you can do the math that is not double that is actually roughly 42 percent more performance because at least in these kind of tasks it's not scaling linearly testing out speedometer 2.0 for web browsing performance you see that the speed is the same because a lot of this is single core tasks and they are very similar but then testing out web-based applications like figma this is created for us by 500 designs one of the best studios in La smoothness is identical with both of these systems and then when I selected 12 of these high resolution web pages and exported them to times where identical for both of these once again so if you use web-based applications don't expect a big difference between these systems you could save the money in terms of Graphics.
We have 30 cores compared to 60. once again double the core counts now both of these can be upgraded to have the unbined chip with the Mt Max that costs you 200 bucks but with the M2 Ultra that is a 1 000 upgrade that is crazy now in this video I'm just going off of the base specs I have other videos that show there's differences between the other configurations but looking at geek bench 6's metal score we have slightly better scaling than CPU but once again it's only about a 45 difference not a doubling of performance now with that said the M2 Ultra has much better scaling than the M1 Ultra.
You'll see in some of these upcoming tests but it is still not perfect in 3dmark's Wildlife extreme which is a gaming Benchmark here we see about a 48 difference so yeah it's there but the bang for the buck is definitely going down if you want to play the Metal based applications and games pushing the CPUs to their limits in Cinemax R23 this is where we start to see a much bigger proper difference of almost 92 percent for 13 and a half thousand compared to almost twenty eight thousand so if your program can push the CPU all of the course to their limits. You'll see that difference now this is where I want to take a look at the cooling because this is where we get the most heat now the M2 Ultra ran at 85 degrees with the fans completely idle whereas the M2 Max ran at 69 degrees also idle now I mentioned that the cooler is made out of aluminum it is not as nice as the copper cooler also weighs a lot lot less but because the M2 Max has half the cores has a lot less wattage almost half the wattage it actually runs cooler completely idle and both these run completely silent so don't worry about temperatures or fan noise now for the coders out there we ran our xcode Benchmark.
Here I expected to have a pretty good difference now for those of you guys that run Logic the M2 Ultra can handle 320 tracks in our new logic pro Benchmark you guys can check that out compared to 181 so if you need the most ultimate performance for a lot of plugins a lot of tracks while the ultra will give you that and the extra Raymond here helps as well now as far as blender for 3D rendering I tested out the BMW test first and it flies on the M2 Ultra it took just 13 seconds compared to 21.
So that's not perfect scaling but we're getting there and then in the tougher party tug test here we had 33 seconds compared to a minute and four that is almost perfect scaling and that is where the M2 Ultra is much better than the M1 Ultra they did a great job with the memory and the controller is in here so if you're doing 3D rendering you absolutely should get the ultra now as far as photo editing using Lightroom classic that will harness all the CPU and the GPU performance the M2 Ultra was literally twice as fast in this test everything was useful and it just screams now this is where I need to talk to you guys about how much performance do you actually need the M2 Max is already about twice as powerful as my fifteen thousand dollar Intel Mac Pro this thing is super fast.
I would say for a lot of people the performance is more than enough so just because the M2 Ultra is so much faster that doesn't mean that you need it unless you're exporting thousands of photos a day just because the regular editing performance is very similar between these and in Photoshop running a panorama here the performance is double so it just once again shows if the program can harness it you will get killer scaling and now getting into video editing stabilizing a one minute 4K clip that time was the same and that's because a lot of that time is literally just initializing.
Finishing the stabilization process and then exporting a standard five minute 4K project with effects you guys see that the M2 Ultra is really fast and that is because it has double the encoders for video and with speeds like this a 20 minute project will take just over two minutes to export you don't even have time to go get some coffee or something else it is crazy fast and now getting into something a little tougher we have 4K prores raw encoding into prores that is graded and here the difference is not double it is literally 30 seconds compared to 40 insanely fast for a five minute project on both and that is because both of these do have prores decoders and encoders the M2 Ultra does have double but because it is so insanely fast already well.
You don't get the full benefit here another thing that was weird for me was red AK raw both of these played back perfectly which was a first for me and as far as exporting these the M2 Ultra was just slightly faster now I don't know if there are other bottlenecks maybe it's Red's plugin now that is being a limitation here we obviously have more graphics performance that's mostly Graphics based a little bit CPU based but if you edit with this footage at least for now the difference is negligible now.
I also denoise 4K Blackmagic raw and DaVinci Resolve and this has both spatial and temporal and even the M2 Max was able to play back at a perfect 24 frames per second which was the first for a Mac now the M2 Ultra has a little bit of overhead but it's just a tiny bit more not much at all so once again either it's some kind of limitation I don't know what's going on but even for this crazy tough task um they are closer than I would expect effect now with that said should you spend the extra two thousand dollars and I'll be honest with you guys for me personally I would say no because sometimes you could wait a little bit longer because it's already incredibly fast and other times the results were quite similar and the scaling in a lot of things was not perfect so if you need something specific like the Photoshop and Lightroom insane performance or super fast exports for standard footage I would say maybe it would be worth it.
I think the main way it would be worth it is for those that use blender because Macs are already behind windows and video based systems but spending twice the money even though scaling is a better time around at this time around it is just a hard sell so for us we are going to stick to the M2 Max version now.
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