The Mac Studio: A Comparative Analysis with the MacBook Pro

In this article, we'll delve into a comprehensive comparison between the Apple Mac Studio and the MacBook Pro, focusing on their performance, power consumption, and temperature management. Our testing included various benchmarking tools and software applications to evaluate these machines' capabilities.

**Project 1: 15-Minute 4K Project**

We began our testing with a 15-minute 4K project, which served as a baseline for both machines. This project consisted of a pixel 6 Pro versus S21 Ultra camera comparison video, full of titles, motion graphics, and effects, as well as side-by-side images and videos. We wanted to see how the playback was on both machines.

We hard-coded our benchmark tool to play back these projects in quality mode and were pleased to find that both machines performed smoothly with no frame drops. However, when we exported this project to H.564, the MacBook Pro took 9 minutes and 30 seconds, while the Mac Studio finished at 10 minutes and 26 seconds. Although they have the same media encode and decode engines, the project's effects required GPU utilization, which led to a slight delay on the MacBook Pro due to its eight fewer GPU cores.

**Project 2: 6K Final Cut Test**

Next, we moved on to our 6K Final Cut test, which was shorter at 6 minutes but still demanding, with H.565 footage that required less GPU effort. This project consisted of basic titles and no extreme effects, so the GPU wasn't pushed too hard. Playback remained smooth on both machines without any frame drops.

When exporting this project to H.264, the MacBook Pro took 18 minutes and 9 seconds, while the Mac Studio finished at 18 minutes and 4 seconds. The Mac Studio was faster in this test, likely due to its slightly better performance with GPU-bound tasks.

**Project 3: 8K 60 FPS Project**

Our final project was the most demanding of all – an 8K 60 frames per second export with 8K redraw footage side-by-side with motion track titles. This test pushed both machines to their limits, even in quality mode. However, playback was still remarkably smooth on both.

When exporting this project to H.264, the MacBook Pro took 45 minutes and 30 seconds, while the Mac Studio finished at 46 minutes and 39 seconds. Both machines were heavily utilized by CPU and GPU, with similar power draw, temperature, and clock speeds.

**Logic Pro 10 and Xcode Tests**

We also tested Logic Pro 10 and Xcode to evaluate their performance. In Logic Pro, we opened a Billy Illest sample project and exported each track into individual AIF files. The results were identical on both machines – one minute and seven seconds – with almost identical power draw.

In Xcode, we created our own stress test project, which revealed that the Mac Studio was faster by 30 seconds while drawing more power than the MacBook Pro, despite maintaining a slightly higher clock speed.

**Blender's Classroom Scene**

Finally, we tested Blender's Classroom scene using the Cycle CPU render. This test was heavily CPU-bound and showed that both machines remained stable with identical clock speeds and power draw, even at high CPU temperatures on the MacBook Pro.

**Geekbench and GFX Bench Tests**

To assess any potential throttling under extreme load, we ran Geekbench and GFX Bench one more time after our extensive testing. The results confirmed that neither machine exhibited significant performance degradation or throttling, even after hours of intense usage.

In conclusion, when disregarding our initial Lightroom test on the Mac Studio, there's only a three-minute difference between these two machines in terms of performance. Given Apple's expected fixes to their power draw issues, we expect the Mac Studio to outperform the MacBook Pro in future tests. If you're on a budget and already have a screen, keyboard, and mouse, getting the Mac Studio is an attractive option. We'll continue to monitor and update our findings as more tests become available.

The author's signature follows at the end of each test: "Danielle / Tech"

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to probably one of the most unique benchmark videos that you've ever seen and that's because we've built our own custom benchmarking tool that runs a series of tests that we give it all by itself without us even needing to touch the keyboard or the mouse what this means is that we can perfectly compare two devices side by side and with a timer you'll see exactly which one of the two is faster at the end of 13 different tests from geekbench and cinebench to some real world usage in lightroom photoshop logic xcode blender and more in this video we tested the base mac studio with a 24 core gpu m1 max that sells for 2 000 against the m1 max 16 inch macbook pro that features a 32 core gpu that sells for 3500 to see if by any chance you'll actually get better performance from the weaker mac studio as this is a desktop with a much better cooling system our tool has now started the benchmark so you can see the live timer on the ipad as well as some metrics that i'll go over in more detail right after we're done the first test is geekbench 5 which the macbook pro finishes only half a second later they're both moving to our cinebench test where it seems like the macbook pro is slightly ahead and finishes first they're both opening gfx bench now to run the 1440p aztec ruins off screen test and as you can see the macbook pro is in the lead as it's already at the compute test which it just finished while the mac studio is still going the macbook pro is now starting test number five the aja the speed test while the mac studio is still on the geekbench compute they're both in the lightroom test now and i'm going to go over in more detail as to what each test is and what it does but for now the mac pro finished this significantly faster with the mac studio still going the macbook pro is now done with a photoshop test and is now starting the final cut 4k test whereas the mac studio is still two tests behind i was honestly not expecting this much of a difference between the two especially not in a macbook pro's favor we're now on to the final cut 8k project and it seems like this is when the mac studio has started catching up a bit the macbook pro is still ahead but at least they are both on the same test now or maybe not for long because the macbook pro has already moved on to logic pro 10 and now it's doing the xcode test while the mac studio is still rendering that 8k project now the macbook pro is doing the blender render and the mac studio seems to have cut up once again our mac pro is doing the last two tests which are reruns of geekbench and gfx bench and there you go the mac pro finished in two hours and six minutes while the base max studio took a couple of minutes longer finishing in two hours and 15 minutes and to be honest this is actually really good just nine minutes slower back when i was doing all of our youtube videos entirely by myself i had to juggle between final cut photoshop lightroom adobe edition so i was using a lot of different software tools every single day for every video basically which is why our speed test can show you a more real world difference than just running a single geekbench or a single video export as you don't really get the full picture there unless you run multiple tests uh one after another uh like you would in an actual day of work now taking a look at our leaderboard the 16-inch m1 max macbook pro is currently in the first place followed by the mac studio in the second uh the 14-inch baseline m1 pro and the third and then the m1 13-inch macbook pro and the fourth but wait we aren't done just yet in the background we also measured thermals clock speeds fan speeds ram usage and even the wattage for each of these tests and now we're going to sync up the footage so that we can put the devices side by side just to see how they each performed at each of these tests and what really gave the six inch macbook pro that nine minute lead in terms of our first test which was geekbench five the main thing that i noticed was how much cooler the mac studio was you can see this on both the thermal camera and our temperature readings the max studio was about 20 to 30 degrees cooler on the cpu as well as the gpu and the overall chassis temperature difference was quite significant too in terms of the results the macbook pro scored higher in both multi-core and single core which was very unexpected as they both have the exact same 10 core cpu so if anything the max studio should have been faster here thanks to the better cooling system so what about cinebench which unlike geekbench it does fully max out the cpu usage to render the scene for exactly 10 minutes the temperatures were insanely high on the 16 inch reaching even 96 degrees while the max studio never went above 60 with its fans still being on the lowest setting so you can definitely see how much better the mac studio's cooling system really is here but when we got the results the macbook pro was once again faster not by that much but still faster so i had a look at a port draw and noticed that the mac studio was only drawing about 25 watts of power for the cpu while the macbook pro was drawing about 27. for some reason apple just isn't letting it run at its full peak performance then we ran gfx bench off screen to test the raw gpu performance without the results being impacted by the resolution of the displays and just like in cinebench the gpu temperatures on the 16-inch reached 90 degrees compared to just 53 on the mac studio sadly in terms of the power draw we had the exact same issue here with the max studios gpu only drawing 31.6 watts of power compared to 43 on the macbook pro the macbook pro got 302 frames per second while the mac studio got 238 that is 26 more on the macbook while having 33 percent more gpu cores then we run geekbench compute another gpu benchmark just less intensive and here i noticed the exact same power draw issues as before so it does seem to be consistent no matter what app you use the 32 core m1 max inside the macbook pro was 12 percent faster here compared to the 24 core m1 max inside the base max studio and now we wanted to see if there was any difference in terms of the disk speed um using ajt speed tests we wrote and then read the 16 gigabyte 4k file and it seems like the macbook pro had a noticeably faster write speed here while the mac studio had a marginally faster read speed i should also mention that our mac studio is the base 512gb model while our macbook pro has one terabyte larger drives are usually faster so it would be really interesting to see how the one terabyte m1 ultra of the mac studio uh would actually compare against the 16 inch macbook pro definitely subscribe to see that video as soon as it comes out now let's move on to some real world usage starting off with lightroom where we first imported 288 images of various resolutions up to 100 megapixels the import speed was about the same on both at seven seconds we then applied the same presets with the same adjustments on all the other 227 images and this took 51 seconds on both we then converted all of these into compressed jpegs and this took 4 minutes and 45 seconds on the maco pro versus 11 minutes and 46 seconds on the mac studio now this surely cannot be right right as lightroom just uses the cpu and they both have the same 10 core m1 max cpu in fact the max studio should have been faster here as it has a much better cooling system which we could once again see by looking at the temperatures the culprit was once again the pardra with a 6 inch drawing as much as 32 watts while the max studio was only drawing about 30 at the highest although in most cases it was staying at 15 or even as low as 8. something wasn't right here so we decided to run the test a second time and this time the results were much closer 5 minutes on a 16 inch compared to 5 minutes and 43 seconds on the mac studio but even this time the mac studio should have still been faster which was sadly not the case moving on to our photoshop test we loaded in a 50 megapixel photo and applied three different filters with adjustments to each this doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do for these machines but trust me when you're working with such a large file it is so this entire test from the moment we open up photoshop took two minutes and seven seconds on the macbook pro while the mac studio took two minutes and ten seconds so basically the same here then we tested final cut starting off with our own 15-minute 4k project which was actually our pixel 6 pro versus s21 ultra camera comparison video this was a very difficult project as it was full of titles motion graphics and effects as well as loads of side-by-side images and videos we first wanted to see how the playback was so we hard coded our benchmark tool to play back these projects in quality mode and they were both perfectly smooth with no frame drops we then exported this to h.564 and the macbook pro was faster taking 9 minutes and 30 seconds versus 10 minutes and 26 seconds on the mac studio and this was because even though they both have the same media encode and decode engines this project was full of effects meaning that the gpu also had to be utilized and because the maco pro has eight more gpu cores it managed to finish the export faster although this time the gpu frequency and the gpu power draw were much more similar between these two machines we then moved on to our 6k final cut test which was shorter at 6 minutes but full of h.565 footage which is more demanding this project didn't really have any effect aside from just some basic titles so the gpu would not need to be pushed as hard as the video encoders would be carrying most of the load playback was still perfectly smooth on both without any frame drops and exporting this project took 18 minutes and 9 seconds on the macbook pro compared to 18 minutes and four seconds on the mac studio the mac studio was finally faster here you can also see how just like i mentioned the gpu was barely even used as its frequency was down to a minimum and here we have our most demanding project yet an 8k 60 frames per second project with 8k redraw footage side by side with motion track titles as well playback was not real time anymore but it was still very impressive and keep in mind that this was also in quality mode on both so i'm just blown away by how smooth these were we exported into h.264 and it took 45 minutes and 30 seconds on the macbook pro and 46 minutes and 39 seconds on the mac studio because of how this project was both the cpu and the gpu were heavily used with the power draw frequencies and even the ram usage being extremely similar the only major difference being the temperatures which were consistently 20-30 degrees lower on the max studio while also keeping its fans to their minimum the macbook pros fans were quite ramped up at that point we then moved to logic pro 10 where we opened up a billy ilist sample project and exported each track into individual aiff 16-bit files and this look exactly the same on both one minutes and seven seconds with pretty much an identical power draw between the two this time we also tested xcode where we made our very own stress test project the mac studio was faster by 30 seconds while also for the very first time drawing more power than the macbook pro and also keeping a slightly higher clock speed and then we also tested blender's classroom scene using the cycle cpu render uh which just like our xcode test is very cpu heavy and what was really interesting to see here is that the clock speeds and the power draw remained almost identical on both despite the mac pro being in the high 80s in terms of the cpu temperatures compared to the high 50s on the mac studio the max studio was actually faster here by 13 seconds now before we ended our testing we had our tool run geekbench and gfx bench one more time to see if after all of these tests that we had been running for almost two hours now we would see any throttling and in fact the geekbench scores were actually higher on both the macbook pro and the mac studio in gfx bench the maco pro stayed pretty much the same while the mac studio only dropped one fps so it is safe to say that these machines do not throttle even under extreme load for hours and hours so in conclusion if we disregard our first lightroom run on the mac studio and we include our second then there's only a three minute difference between these two machines which in my opinion is just negligible and i'm sure that once apple actually fixes these weird power draw issues we should actually see even better performance from the base mac studio when compared to 32 core m1 max 16 inch mac pro so if you're on a budget and you already have a screen a keyboard and a mouse then getting the bass mac studio is a no-brainer if you've enjoyed our speed test then definitely do subscribe as we do have more of them in the works right now i'm danielle this is tech and i'll see you guys in the next one santa tech signing out cheerswelcome to probably one of the most unique benchmark videos that you've ever seen and that's because we've built our own custom benchmarking tool that runs a series of tests that we give it all by itself without us even needing to touch the keyboard or the mouse what this means is that we can perfectly compare two devices side by side and with a timer you'll see exactly which one of the two is faster at the end of 13 different tests from geekbench and cinebench to some real world usage in lightroom photoshop logic xcode blender and more in this video we tested the base mac studio with a 24 core gpu m1 max that sells for 2 000 against the m1 max 16 inch macbook pro that features a 32 core gpu that sells for 3500 to see if by any chance you'll actually get better performance from the weaker mac studio as this is a desktop with a much better cooling system our tool has now started the benchmark so you can see the live timer on the ipad as well as some metrics that i'll go over in more detail right after we're done the first test is geekbench 5 which the macbook pro finishes only half a second later they're both moving to our cinebench test where it seems like the macbook pro is slightly ahead and finishes first they're both opening gfx bench now to run the 1440p aztec ruins off screen test and as you can see the macbook pro is in the lead as it's already at the compute test which it just finished while the mac studio is still going the macbook pro is now starting test number five the aja the speed test while the mac studio is still on the geekbench compute they're both in the lightroom test now and i'm going to go over in more detail as to what each test is and what it does but for now the mac pro finished this significantly faster with the mac studio still going the macbook pro is now done with a photoshop test and is now starting the final cut 4k test whereas the mac studio is still two tests behind i was honestly not expecting this much of a difference between the two especially not in a macbook pro's favor we're now on to the final cut 8k project and it seems like this is when the mac studio has started catching up a bit the macbook pro is still ahead but at least they are both on the same test now or maybe not for long because the macbook pro has already moved on to logic pro 10 and now it's doing the xcode test while the mac studio is still rendering that 8k project now the macbook pro is doing the blender render and the mac studio seems to have cut up once again our mac pro is doing the last two tests which are reruns of geekbench and gfx bench and there you go the mac pro finished in two hours and six minutes while the base max studio took a couple of minutes longer finishing in two hours and 15 minutes and to be honest this is actually really good just nine minutes slower back when i was doing all of our youtube videos entirely by myself i had to juggle between final cut photoshop lightroom adobe edition so i was using a lot of different software tools every single day for every video basically which is why our speed test can show you a more real world difference than just running a single geekbench or a single video export as you don't really get the full picture there unless you run multiple tests uh one after another uh like you would in an actual day of work now taking a look at our leaderboard the 16-inch m1 max macbook pro is currently in the first place followed by the mac studio in the second uh the 14-inch baseline m1 pro and the third and then the m1 13-inch macbook pro and the fourth but wait we aren't done just yet in the background we also measured thermals clock speeds fan speeds ram usage and even the wattage for each of these tests and now we're going to sync up the footage so that we can put the devices side by side just to see how they each performed at each of these tests and what really gave the six inch macbook pro that nine minute lead in terms of our first test which was geekbench five the main thing that i noticed was how much cooler the mac studio was you can see this on both the thermal camera and our temperature readings the max studio was about 20 to 30 degrees cooler on the cpu as well as the gpu and the overall chassis temperature difference was quite significant too in terms of the results the macbook pro scored higher in both multi-core and single core which was very unexpected as they both have the exact same 10 core cpu so if anything the max studio should have been faster here thanks to the better cooling system so what about cinebench which unlike geekbench it does fully max out the cpu usage to render the scene for exactly 10 minutes the temperatures were insanely high on the 16 inch reaching even 96 degrees while the max studio never went above 60 with its fans still being on the lowest setting so you can definitely see how much better the mac studio's cooling system really is here but when we got the results the macbook pro was once again faster not by that much but still faster so i had a look at a port draw and noticed that the mac studio was only drawing about 25 watts of power for the cpu while the macbook pro was drawing about 27. for some reason apple just isn't letting it run at its full peak performance then we ran gfx bench off screen to test the raw gpu performance without the results being impacted by the resolution of the displays and just like in cinebench the gpu temperatures on the 16-inch reached 90 degrees compared to just 53 on the mac studio sadly in terms of the power draw we had the exact same issue here with the max studios gpu only drawing 31.6 watts of power compared to 43 on the macbook pro the macbook pro got 302 frames per second while the mac studio got 238 that is 26 more on the macbook while having 33 percent more gpu cores then we run geekbench compute another gpu benchmark just less intensive and here i noticed the exact same power draw issues as before so it does seem to be consistent no matter what app you use the 32 core m1 max inside the macbook pro was 12 percent faster here compared to the 24 core m1 max inside the base max studio and now we wanted to see if there was any difference in terms of the disk speed um using ajt speed tests we wrote and then read the 16 gigabyte 4k file and it seems like the macbook pro had a noticeably faster write speed here while the mac studio had a marginally faster read speed i should also mention that our mac studio is the base 512gb model while our macbook pro has one terabyte larger drives are usually faster so it would be really interesting to see how the one terabyte m1 ultra of the mac studio uh would actually compare against the 16 inch macbook pro definitely subscribe to see that video as soon as it comes out now let's move on to some real world usage starting off with lightroom where we first imported 288 images of various resolutions up to 100 megapixels the import speed was about the same on both at seven seconds we then applied the same presets with the same adjustments on all the other 227 images and this took 51 seconds on both we then converted all of these into compressed jpegs and this took 4 minutes and 45 seconds on the maco pro versus 11 minutes and 46 seconds on the mac studio now this surely cannot be right right as lightroom just uses the cpu and they both have the same 10 core m1 max cpu in fact the max studio should have been faster here as it has a much better cooling system which we could once again see by looking at the temperatures the culprit was once again the pardra with a 6 inch drawing as much as 32 watts while the max studio was only drawing about 30 at the highest although in most cases it was staying at 15 or even as low as 8. something wasn't right here so we decided to run the test a second time and this time the results were much closer 5 minutes on a 16 inch compared to 5 minutes and 43 seconds on the mac studio but even this time the mac studio should have still been faster which was sadly not the case moving on to our photoshop test we loaded in a 50 megapixel photo and applied three different filters with adjustments to each this doesn't seem like a difficult thing to do for these machines but trust me when you're working with such a large file it is so this entire test from the moment we open up photoshop took two minutes and seven seconds on the macbook pro while the mac studio took two minutes and ten seconds so basically the same here then we tested final cut starting off with our own 15-minute 4k project which was actually our pixel 6 pro versus s21 ultra camera comparison video this was a very difficult project as it was full of titles motion graphics and effects as well as loads of side-by-side images and videos we first wanted to see how the playback was so we hard coded our benchmark tool to play back these projects in quality mode and they were both perfectly smooth with no frame drops we then exported this to h.564 and the macbook pro was faster taking 9 minutes and 30 seconds versus 10 minutes and 26 seconds on the mac studio and this was because even though they both have the same media encode and decode engines this project was full of effects meaning that the gpu also had to be utilized and because the maco pro has eight more gpu cores it managed to finish the export faster although this time the gpu frequency and the gpu power draw were much more similar between these two machines we then moved on to our 6k final cut test which was shorter at 6 minutes but full of h.565 footage which is more demanding this project didn't really have any effect aside from just some basic titles so the gpu would not need to be pushed as hard as the video encoders would be carrying most of the load playback was still perfectly smooth on both without any frame drops and exporting this project took 18 minutes and 9 seconds on the macbook pro compared to 18 minutes and four seconds on the mac studio the mac studio was finally faster here you can also see how just like i mentioned the gpu was barely even used as its frequency was down to a minimum and here we have our most demanding project yet an 8k 60 frames per second project with 8k redraw footage side by side with motion track titles as well playback was not real time anymore but it was still very impressive and keep in mind that this was also in quality mode on both so i'm just blown away by how smooth these were we exported into h.264 and it took 45 minutes and 30 seconds on the macbook pro and 46 minutes and 39 seconds on the mac studio because of how this project was both the cpu and the gpu were heavily used with the power draw frequencies and even the ram usage being extremely similar the only major difference being the temperatures which were consistently 20-30 degrees lower on the max studio while also keeping its fans to their minimum the macbook pros fans were quite ramped up at that point we then moved to logic pro 10 where we opened up a billy ilist sample project and exported each track into individual aiff 16-bit files and this look exactly the same on both one minutes and seven seconds with pretty much an identical power draw between the two this time we also tested xcode where we made our very own stress test project the mac studio was faster by 30 seconds while also for the very first time drawing more power than the macbook pro and also keeping a slightly higher clock speed and then we also tested blender's classroom scene using the cycle cpu render uh which just like our xcode test is very cpu heavy and what was really interesting to see here is that the clock speeds and the power draw remained almost identical on both despite the mac pro being in the high 80s in terms of the cpu temperatures compared to the high 50s on the mac studio the max studio was actually faster here by 13 seconds now before we ended our testing we had our tool run geekbench and gfx bench one more time to see if after all of these tests that we had been running for almost two hours now we would see any throttling and in fact the geekbench scores were actually higher on both the macbook pro and the mac studio in gfx bench the maco pro stayed pretty much the same while the mac studio only dropped one fps so it is safe to say that these machines do not throttle even under extreme load for hours and hours so in conclusion if we disregard our first lightroom run on the mac studio and we include our second then there's only a three minute difference between these two machines which in my opinion is just negligible and i'm sure that once apple actually fixes these weird power draw issues we should actually see even better performance from the base mac studio when compared to 32 core m1 max 16 inch mac pro so if you're on a budget and you already have a screen a keyboard and a mouse then getting the bass mac studio is a no-brainer if you've enjoyed our speed test then definitely do subscribe as we do have more of them in the works right now i'm danielle this is tech and i'll see you guys in the next one santa tech signing out cheers\n"