Ahead of Tuesday’s launch of the new Mac Studio powered by the M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, early reviews of the computer have been shared by some tech websites and YouTube channels. According to a study published by MacmondeAccording to Roman Loyola, the biggest upgrade isn’t even the M5 Ultra, but rather significantly faster storage speeds.
“Typically, we start our benchmarks by looking at overall performance with Geekbench, then we look at more specific aspects,” he said. “But the SSD performance is so good that it’s the story here.”
Loyola ran Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test benchmark tool on the new Mac Studio with an 18-core M5 Max chip, 128 GB of RAM and a 4 TB SSD, and the computer achieved SSD read speeds approximately 2.6 times faster and SSD write speeds approximately 2.1 times faster compared to a previous generation Mac Studio with the M4 Max chip. The results are shown in the image below.
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Indeed, Apple announced up to 2x faster storage speeds for the new Mac Studio, and these benchmark results show an even greater improvement. As always, actual performance may vary, but expect significantly faster overall speeds for SSDs.
The M5 Ultra benchmark results already surfaced last week if you’re interested.
Unsurprisingly, the M5 Ultra is the fastest chip Apple has ever made. Based on Geekbench 7 results so far, it offers up to around 30% faster single-core CPU performance and up to around 35% faster multi-core performance compared to the M3 Ultra. But this comes at a high cost. In the US, the Mac Studio with a 36-core M5 Ultra starts at $6,799.
Apple said the M5 Ultra has up to 1.25x faster single-threaded CPU performance and up to 1.3x faster multi-threaded CPU performance compared to the M3 Ultra, so the benchmark results roughly match, or even exceed, these advertised claims.
Overall, the new Mac Studio is blazing fast, with The edgeAntonio G. Di Benedetto describes the performance of the M5 Ultra model as “outrageous” and PCMagBrian Westover’s Brian Westover calls the computer “a serious powerhouse for leading local AI inference.”
The new Mac Studio and a new Mac mini with M6 and M5 Pro chip options have been available for pre-order since August 25 and will launch this Tuesday, September 22.
