M3 Ultra Mac Studio- First Look at Apple's Most Powerful Desktop Yet!

The beast is in the studio, the brand new M3 Ultra Mac Studio. Now not to be confused with the M4 Max version, we'll get into that later. This is the powerhouse version. This has a 32 core CPU, 80 core GPU, 256 gigs of RAM with four terabytes of storage. The fact that you can spec this thing out to be a $14,000 overkill of a machine is, it's so incredible. The exciting thing though, is for people who are doing really high-end graphics and production, this thing is going to be so perfect for everything that you need. Let's unbox. This is the most exciting part. Precious goods. I feel like I've just come upon a treasure chest of gold and diamonds and jewelry. This is the equivalent of that. Even this box, it's just so impressive. Like this is kind of like spring loaded in there to keep it protected in shipping. What a beautiful box. We've got our power cable and the studio. Look at it. This thing is so heavy. This is everything that as a child growing up, I dreamed about. Oh, it smells so good. That smells like performance. So unfortunately this isn't something that I can set up at this desk because I don't have any displays, but I just so happen to know where I have a few Pro Display XDRs and a studio display to plug this into. So let's get to it. So here's the beefy new Mac Studio in all of its glory. And now this has two chip configurations, which might at first seem a little confusing, maybe even at second, it's probably still confusing, but we've got the M4 Max, which is yes, the newest version of Apple Silicon, but the M3 Ultra chip actually has the upper hand in this fight. You're able to spec out the M3 Ultra with a 32 core CPU, including 24 performance cores and a GPU configurable up to 80 cores. It starts with a 96 gigs of unified memory, which can be expanded up to 512 gigabytes, which is so beautiful. And for solid state storage options, those range from one terabyte to 16. Oh, I love it. Now the M4 Max features up to a 16 core CPU and a 40 core GPU, which delivers up to three and a half times the performance of the previous M1 Max model. It starts with 36 gigs of unified memory, which you can expand up to 128 gigs and support solid state storage from 512 up to eight terabytes. So yeah, there are definitely some differences, but depending upon your processing needs, one of these will probably be more than enough than you actually ever need. So yeah, that is a lot of spec talk, but all I can tell you is that having tested out the previous versions of the Max Studio, that for most of you watching this, it's more than you'll ever need, probably for the rest of your computing life. Okay, well that might be a little bit of exaggeration, but these things are just absolute fire. So I've been testing this out and as a video editor, of course, the first thing that I jumped into is an 8K footage from my Sony A1. So we shot all of this B-roll in 8K to have some nice test footage to work with. And so far it has not disappointed at all. Now I also downloaded some Sony Venice 2 test footage right out of the camera and I'm gonna bring that into DaVinci and we're gonna see how this colors. Now I shoot mostly on Sony cameras. So using this Venice 2 footage, this is some of the highest quality footage that I could possibly get my hands on right now. And being able to take this into DaVinci and add a few color nodes. I did some coloring, I added some beauty filters, some noise reduction. We also did a little relight and everything ran so smooth. It was almost completely flawless. I actually had never tried this beauty filter before. So I had a lot of fun testing this out and I was pretty surprised how quickly it just tracked and monitored her face. And here we just completely did a new makeover. The other thing that I cannot wait to play is Cyberpunk and unfortunately it's not out yet but you may have seen some of the demos running on the Mac and I will be first in line for that. Now both of these new models are introducing advanced graphics features like dynamic caching, caching? Caching, hardware accelerated mesh shading and a second generation ray tracing engine. These enhancements are going to provide more realistic lighting, shadows, reflections, making it ideal for content creators and gamers. I mean, does this mean that the Mac is finally gonna be a gaming PC? I don't know, just maybe. And also don't yell at me for calling this a PC. PC stands for personal computer. That doesn't mean you're just moving on. As for ports, it has got some extensive connectivity options including Thunderbolt 5 ports, USB-A ports, HDMI and a 10 gigabit ethernet port. This is ensuring compatibility with a wide range of peripherals. Now I have not maxed out the capabilities of my M4 MacBook yet. So until then, I can continue using that. But the advantage of having the studio is it's able to support way more peripherals and monitors. Actually, it can support up to eight 6K displays or four 8K displays with the M3 Ultra. That would be such a dream. I honestly don't even need, I don't even know what I would put on all the monitors. Like I probably would just have iMessage on one, editing on one, my email on another, a preview panel maybe up here. I don't know, Photoshop on the, it's just, I don't think I need that many, but it sounds nice. Okay, I forgot that I bought these. This is a Thunderbolt 5 dock from OWC. And I also got this one too, it's a Thunderbolt Pro dock. What I kind of have set up over here, it's kind of wild. I have all of these displays that pretty much connect to my MacBook Pro currently, but now we're gonna connect this all to the studio. Let's just do a little upgrade. I've been wanting to do this for a while. This, five baby. Oh, look at this. All right, let's plug them in. So we've got our little Thunderbolt party happening here. We've got the Pro dock at the bottom, the Thunderbolt 5 here at the top, and we've got some of our monitors running directly into the studio. And it's also connected to the Thunder Bay Flex and also these Thunder Blades, all connected to the studio and then also another little OWC drive. I'm gonna get a controller. Look at that, that looks like something that I could do a little damage with. Get me out of here, get me out of here, get me out of here, scary. Look at the detail and the texture on his hair, his skin. Well, I'm pretty impressed so far with the gaming capabilities, but I have one more game to test out. Let's see if it's downloaded. Oh, it's ready. We have Civilization VII just downloaded, fresh from Steam. Game mode on. Game mode prioritizes the performance of this game while in full screen. Yeah, I can see how I will not wanna do anything else. Oh boy. Nathan was like, hey, you should try running this because it doesn't really run that well on my M1. Well, it's running fan-freaking-tastic. Okay, I have to stop doing this because I need to pack, I need to edit this video. There's so much that I have to do and now I just wanna play this game. So this is just kind of my first impressions of the new Mac Studio. And I know that my personal and work uses it's so much more power than I will need for a very long time. I even specced out one of the top of the line models and it brought a tear to my eye, not only because of the price, but because of how much power it could deliver. The M4 Max model starts at $19.99 while the M3 Ultra model starts at $39.99. Yeah, those prices all sound great until you start adding upgrades, which I feel like most people probably will. So let me know what you guys think. I'm sure we'll be greeted with the haters in the comments saying to just build your own PC for cheaper. No, that's fine. That's okay. If you wanna go build your own, do what you want. I'm just gonna be over here minding my own business, exporting and editing at the speed of light on this beautiful little Mac Studio. Thank you all so much for watching. If you wanna check out more of my videos, they'll be linked here at the end. And don't forget to like, subscribe and hit the bell to be notified when I post more videos. I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye-bye.