The Mac Studio M5 Ultra is one of the most powerful desktops you can buy on either macOS or Windows. Its Geekbench 6 CPU single-core score is among the highest Engadget has seen, falling just below the new Mac Mini M6’s tally due to the latter’s more recent processor. For the multi-core CPU test, I needed to use Geekbench 7 (Geekbench 6 couldn’t seem to handle the M5 Ultra’s extra cores), and the new Mac Studio destroyed the old Mac Studio M3 Ultra with a score of 52,185 compared to 39,145. That’s right up there with AMD’s latest 64-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro CPU.
GPU scores were also impressive, and sustained disk speeds were the highest results I’ve seen with 14GB/s write and 11GB/s read speeds, nearly double the previous model. Apple withdrew its initial claim that the Mac Studio M5 Ultra used the new PCIe 6.0 standard, but this is as fast as PCIe 5.0 can possibly go.
All told, the M5 Ultra model seems to offer speeds in the range of 20 to 30 percent better than the M3 Ultra model across CPU, GPU and neural engine scores. Single-core CPU performance is the same as the M5 Max version (based on the MacBook Pro), while multi-CPU and GPU speeds are also about 20 to 30 percent faster. In synthetic Geekbench AI tests for CPU, GPU and neural engine, the M5 Ultra model was only about 10 percent faster than its M5 Max counterpart.
Synthetic tests are one thing, but I couldn’t wait to try the Mac Studio M5 Ultra on some content creation tasks. In one test, I exported a nine-minute 4K timeline (with mostly 8K H.256 footage) in a minute and 13 seconds, a task that took my MacBook M3 Pro well over eight minutes. I didn’t even have time to get a coffee like I usually do during renders.
I also tested Apple’s claim that this machine can play eight 8K 30 fps ProRes tracks at once in real time. It was easily able to do that on a 4K timeline with 4K monitoring, though not on an 8K timeline. Even more impressively, I was able to play four 7K RAW tracks, each with extensive color correction, all at the same time, easily beating what the Mac Studio M4 Max could do. It also provided a smooth and seamless editing experience that let me work as fast as I could think. If I was a busy YouTube creator (with millions in my bank account), I’d really want one of these for my work.
Based on its marketing, though, Apple clearly believes the bulk of buyers for the M5 Ultra model will be AI power users who want to run models locally. With 512GB of unified memory and 1.2TB/s bandwidth, it’s capable of running “frontier-class” models with billions of parameters local, Apple claims on its product page.
Steve Dent for Engadget
After testing it, I can see why. With its updated neural engine, the Mac Studio Ultra M5 demolished the synthetic Geekbench AI neural engine test with, again, the highest scores I’ve seen. Using Mac Whisper, I transcribed a 70-minute Engadget podcast in 18 seconds — less than a quarter the time it took with the Mac Studio M4 Max version.
If more local AI model speed is required, there’s an easy solution if you have the means. Simply stack up to four Mac Studio M5 Ultra machines together and link them into a cluster via Thunderbolt 5. Four machines will work in concert to process your AI three times faster than a single machine, Apple claims. The company declined to give me $45,000 worth of computers, so I wasn’t able to test this.
As before, I played Baldur’s Gate III and was highly impressed, though I felt sheepish for doing so on such an expensive computer. The game ran smoothly at 4K 60 fps on “Ultra” settings, averaging over 80 fps and never dipping below 60 fps speeds. The quiet fan kicked on during gameplay, the only time I heard it during my tests. It’s still likely to be outperformed by Windows PC gaming machines that come with faster dedicated GPUs, like NVIDIA’s RTX 5090. Still, for a Mac, the M5 Ultra is as good as it gets for gaming.
