Apple's Fastest Mac vs. My $5496 PC

foreign [Music] [Music] not quite first I got to download those new drivers and I got to erase the trial software that came on my hard drive sweet and I've got a lot of manuals to read let me know when you're ready actually the recipe's in some other boxes so I'll meet up with you later some of that is still unfortunately true today but what exactly does this Mac vs PC conversation look like in 2023 which machine is faster which one is more efficient and more importantly how is the experience different to answer this question I actually reached out to Apple and I said hey can I borrow one of those new M2 Ultra Max Studios they actually responded and sent out an absolute Beast so this is their fastest Mac Studio whereas a Mac Mini we'll talk about at 10 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores this thing can be Juiced up to double the CPU cores in almost five times the GPU cores and that is basically what we have here 24 CPU cores 76 GPU cores all on a single chip this one also has 128 gigabytes of memory which is shared between the CPU and GPU and we also have four terabytes of storage those specs get this thing close to seven thousand dollars and maxing out the memory and storage you can actually push this thing close to nine so 7K you know that is like workstation PC pricing someone's spending that much money on a desktop system they want a system that can chew through basically anything but I already have one of those and it's this my super Overkill liquid cooled workstation which I use for absolutely everything you can think of it as a Mac Studio M2 Ultra but just a PC it's packing an RTX 4090 a ryzen 7800 X 3D 32 gigabytes of ddr5 memory and 6 terabytes of nvme storage the entire thing is liquid cooled as well I've got two radiators in there five fans a custom Fan Hub metal tubing and a low profile pump and completely custom cables and that brings me to my first point oh my God that thing is heavy uh the Mac Studio you just unbox it and you plug it in and at the end of the day computers are tools there is a lot of value in actually just unboxing something and getting it up and running as fast as possible now of course not every PC build requires as much work my one to assemble but even the easiest of PC boards out there require a bunch of research and compatibility checks they are a far cry from the Apple experience which is just unboxing it and pushing on the power button even when you get to the desktop on both machines there is still some truth to that Apple commercial from 2006. on the Mac Studio I had one software update to do 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 which all require a full restart for each one but maybe it's all worth it when it comes to Performance I mean I really hope so so the Mac Studio with the M2 Ultra comes in at about seven thousand dollars and my custom PC build on the other hand is about five and a half now a lot of that money has been spent on premium water cooling hardware and a pretty expensive compact case basically if you don't care about those things and having a really comp see you can actually get the same spec the same performance just in a much larger form factor for about three and a half this comparison though I think makes a lot more sense you know it shows what you need to spend to get a similar form factor machine at least and there is a lot of value in that portability now I wasn't planning on doing any synthetic benchmarks for this test but the new cinebench just came out so I mean of course we have to try it so let's start with the multi-threaded CPU test this fires up every CPU core and my PC build gets absolutely assaulted now to be fair I could expect this build with a 7950x which has a double the CPU cores that would have landed us just slightly above the M2 Ultra but to be fair I really don't need that much CPU power for my particular workflow it would as well be pushing the bounds of what I could call in this tiny form factor but even when we compared the single threaded CPU performance the Mac Studio is still a decent bit faster and yes single threaded CPU performance is something that I I do value there are lots of effects and functions in certain apps which can only be executed on a single core so that's a pretty interesting difference also interesting though the new cinebench actually has a GPU Benchmark and you know this is something that I did not hold back with on my personal PC the RTX 4090 that is in that thing is the fastest desktop GPU that you can currently buy so I was expecting my personal PC to absolutely dominate the Mac Studio here and it does in fact we're looking at a four times performance difference here which is massive in other words at least in redshift which is the renderer being used you could get your work done in a quarter of the time on the PC or render out four times the amount of frames what I'm mostly interested in though is video editing particularly in DaVinci Resolve Studio I've been using this for a few years now and every time that I've upgraded my primary machine I have noticed a nice little performance bump so this is a project that I completed a couple of weeks ago ended up doing pretty well some of you might be familiar with it I will say though in the areas on the timeline where I have like super heavy color grading and particularly a lot of denoising I am still seeing that kind of hitching and stuttering when I hit the play button so PC and Mac Studio they have you know pretty similar timeline performance which is a bit of a shame you know I was hoping the Mac Studio would be a little bit different here but seems like they both can't really keep up but something that I was really interested to see on the Mac Studio was how fast it can stabilize a clip so video stabilization think of like a handheld Clip Clips that are shaky or maybe like the panning motion just isn't as smooth as it could be and my PC build can stabilize this clip in about six seconds which is you know really really quick the Mac Studio though can do it in 1.6 which is just mind-blowingly quick now you might be thinking you know four and a half seconds big deal you know that's not a really big difference it's actually a massive difference because you know when you hit that stabilize button you can't do anything else with your PC you're kind of just sitting there waiting for it to finish so on the Mac Studio to just be able to hit stabilize and for it to basically be done before you can like blink and look for the next clip to stabilize yeah that is actually a pretty big workflow speed increase something else that I was pretty interested in was the mask tracking so every now and then there'll be a specific area of a clip that you'll want to make adjustments to I don't do this very often but it is something that does require a bit of time to process and track and yet about the same performance between the two here about a second quicker on the Mac what about video exports though you know how fast can you get a working project like this into something that is watchable on YouTube or something that you can proof watch uh surprisingly the Mac Studio is actually a little bit faster than my PC which is really really surprising something like a five percent difference but still the fact that it even beats my Powerhouse of a PC build is honestly pretty humbling I did also quickly play around with Final Cut Pro which is Apple's own editing software and yeah as you'd expect it runs even faster than a result for example I can have Flawless playback of an identically graded clip from that previous project with pretty heavy denoising there's just no hitching at all learning this software though does lock you into using Mac hardware only which is something that I'm not really keen on something else I was really Keen to check out was blender now this is a 3D modeling software I'm not going to pretend that I do a lot of work in blender my skills are pretty basic but occasionally when the project calls for it I do actually spend quite a lot of time in it and you know blender is super heavy on the GPU so as a bit of a demo my next video actually has quite a lot of blender in it and this is a really quick animation it's just two models about three lights and it goes for about 105 frames so it looks a little something like this and yeah if we were to sit here and render it out we need to render every frame individually now my PC build with the RTX 4090 absolutely rips through this render it's like no challenge at all the Mac Studio on the other hand takes about twice as long but it gets worse and it's kind of painful when you enable denoising which is you know kind of essential for these renders unless you just want to crank the recount up a lot which in effect does just make your renders even longer when you enable denoising the Mac Studio just doesn't cooperate like the renders just take so so much longer in the time that it takes the Mac Studio to completely render one frame and denoise as well my PC build can do like seven or eight frames something else that is definitely worth talking about though is gaming you know because this thing has a pretty decent GPU in it I haven't tested out the game porting toolkit yet but I did test out a few games that are you know kind of natively supported on Apple in the way that you can just download them and click play so the first game that I tried was CS go and this was a mistake again it's basically just the download and hit play on Steam but in the background it's running on opengl and uses the Rosetta translation layer to do so it can run at about 100 frames per second at 1440p low settings which doesn't seem too bad but the input lag is horrible even after manually disabling Mouse acceleration in the terminal for my gpro super light there's just no way that this is even close to a playable experience I then tried shadow of the Tomb Raider which also uses rosetta in the background and while the game looked really good and the average FPS was pretty decent there was constant stuttering and hitching every few seconds the last game I tried was fortnite and the experience here was actually not bad average FPS was over 200 no stuttering Mouse input actually felt pretty decent too I even managed a couple of wins there was the occasional texture glitch but other than that really no issues now of course I'm not going to pretend this is Stellar performance you could get similar numbers here from like a mid-range PC but it does at least give me a bit of Hope especially because hooking up a high refresh rate gaming monitor to this thing is really really easy has an HDMI 2.1 port and that can technically drive a 4K 240Hz display speaking of monitors this is my first experience is with the pro display and I was really hoping not to like this thing but yeah unfortunately it is really really good seeing my timeline resolution for example at 5K resolution is just something else completely I mean I was personally satisfied with my dual 4K setup but this has honestly put those to shame it is still an IPS panel but I mean the colors are brilliant the contrast is super super Punchy way better than my 4K IPS panels but yeah mostly it is that just like unreal pixel density which is so nice to use the biggest complaint I have about this monitor though is it is capped at 60 hertz which is a bit of a shame you know timeline doesn't feel as Snappy as I would like like it's a little bit snappier on my 4K 160hz panels the image quality the overall experience I do prefer this display to edit with but I would love a 120 hertz Pro motion upgrade in the future but I actually have another complaint the Mac Studio even with the M2 Ultra which is the top spec most power hungry chip they have is too quiet like this thing is unreasonably silent there's no point in me showing you any sound Clips or sound tests because even at full load you won't hear anything from this machine at most there is like a bit of warm air coming out of the back but there's no like noticeable fan spin up at all now on one hand that is super impressive like to have a machine that is this small this powerful and have like basically no noise that is just kind of next level but at the same time you know this is the fastest Mac Studio I wouldn't have minded if Apple just let the thing cook a little bit harder let the fan spin up a little bit harder make just at least some noise at full load at least then you can offer a little bit more cooling potential a little bit more power draw and thus faster renders part of this though and something that I do like quite a lot is how efficient Apple's Hardware is the desktop idle power consumption for example makes my new pc look like a piece of trash and the CPU cores are mind-blowingly efficient even compared to amd's latest 7000 series they somehow pull less power and offer more performance the GPU side of things though that's Apple's current biggest challenge performance per watt on the M2 Ultra is actually lower than my 4090 in redshift and again because of how quiet this thing is the GPU seems to be capped at around 110 Watts so I would personally love to see apple push their GPU performance even more aggressively Next Generation or the generation after that to really compete with the PC side of things so look I actually love this tiny little machine it is super incredible and someone who does use a lot of Apple products on a day-to-day basis it was actually super nice to have my desktop system as a part of that entire ecosystem like the fact that I can open notes on my phone and then have that straight away on my desktop was pretty nuts but also then to record a video on my phone and then to just airdrop that to my editing timeline in like five seconds that is something that I'm super jealous of and honestly I'll probably never have that with a Windows PC and look aside from gaming which you know let's just forget gaming for a second as a mini workstation the biggest difference between these two devices is the GPU rendering performance I think things like video editing photo editing even audio work as well those things are slightly better on the Mac Studio and I think that's where the lower priced Mac Mini and even the M2 Pro really really shine but GPU rendering redshift you know blender there is a massive difference there even if you're someone like me who dabbles in a bit of that every now and then you're going to be seriously handicapped at the moment on a Mac versus a PC it's the difference of getting your work done in minutes or hours now Apple are actually letting me hang on to this for a little bit I do have to send it back but for the meantime I am going to be putting it to some serious use and I'm looking forward to using that 5K Pro display as well that thing is an absolute treat but in terms of full-time production use yeah I won't be switching from my Beast of a Mini PC anytime soon

Channel: optimum

Views: 2,357,564

Keywords: apple vs. pc, Apple Mac Studio, Mac Studio M2 Ultra, Apple m2 Ultra, Apple vs fastest PC, optimum tech, optimum, Apple Mac Studio video editing, Mac Studio Blender, Gaming on Apple, can you game on a mac

Id: 5dhuxRF2c_w

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2023