# Mac Studio upgrade advice (from 2019 iMac)



## Abjection (Oct 10, 2022)

Hello all,

I’ve been debating upgrading to a Mac Studio for a while and now that they’re easily available - I’m wondering if I’ll see much of an upgrade in my daily usage.

I currently have an iMac 2019, with an i9 9900k, 128 Gb of ram and several external SSDs for storing libraries and sessions.

I’m eying the mac studio max with 64 gigs of ram (as I dont believe I actually ever even use 64 gigs of ram) and the base level cpu but I’m wondering whether it will be much of a noticeable improvement.

Overall the iMac works great for me, with the only issues being

A. The fan gets pretty loud and annoying regularly.

B. The single core sometimes gets overloaded when using stuff like superior drummer 3, gulfoss, soothe, and leapwing audio sfuff.

I know the mac studio is supposed to be way quieter and snappier running wise - I’m primarily a Logic user, plus I’ll see an upgrade on multi core stuff, but the single core speed doesn’t appear to be much of an improvement, or perhaps even a downgrade in speed than my current iMac - As, the iMac can turbo boost to 5GHZ from the regular 3.6ghz per core for its 8 cores, where I believe the mac studio stays at 3.2ghz constantly for its 10 cores.

Currently the geek bench scores comparing these two single cores show the iMac, at 1230 and the mac studio max at 1754, where the multi core show the iMac at 8194 and the studio at 12328.

Perhaps I should wait for the next line of studios to see if they greatly improve the single core speed before I upgrade?

Anyhow, any advice / insight on this would be extremely appreciated.

Thanks!


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## WandaS (Oct 11, 2022)

I have a Mac Studio Ultra. Take my advise wait for the next series of M2's or M3's.
I don't believe you would gain that much with the 10 core over the i9.
Just quiet which you could solve by using MacsFan and increasing the fan speed 3 or 4 hundred rpm's.
Until the software issue's are worked out on the M1 it's difficult to know just how fast it really is.


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## Abjection (Oct 12, 2022)

Hey Wanda,

Thanks, I pretty l much felt that exact way. I’ve never used Mac’s fan, increasing the RPMs will make the iMac quieter?

Thanks!


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## mat1 (Oct 12, 2022)

Abjection said:


> Currently the geek bench scores comparing these two single cores show the iMac, at 1230 and the mac studio max at 1754, where the multi core show the iMac at 8194 and the studio at 12328.
> 
> Perhaps I should wait for the next line of studios to see if they greatly improve the single core speed before I upgrade?
> 
> Thanks!


How much faster do you want? The studio looks to be about 50% than your current machine


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## Abjection (Oct 12, 2022)

mat1 said:


> How much faster do you want? The studio looks to be about 50% than your current machine


Well for single core speed I’d hope for something that is a real major difference, such as how multi core has shot up to 20 now cpu and 48 gpu. That doesn’t much interest me though as I don’t think I’ve ever had an issue of maxing out multi core performance — it’s usually a single core that gets bogged down.


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## IFM (Oct 12, 2022)

I have an ultra studio and I would say it’s light years ahead of the i9. I had the laptop and you could fry an egg on it.


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## Abjection (Oct 12, 2022)

IFM said:


> I have an ultra studio and I would say it’s light years ahead of the i9. I had the laptop and you could fry an egg on it.


I’m glad to hear this, though I do think the laptop is quite different than an iMac but regardless, I’d love to hear from more people I would love to update im just not sure it’s time yet.


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## mat1 (Oct 12, 2022)

Abjection said:


> Well for single core speed I’d hope for something that is a real major difference, such as how multi core has shot up to 20 now cpu and 48 gpu. That doesn’t much interest me though as I don’t think I’ve ever had an issue of maxing out multi core performance — it’s usually a single core that gets bogged down.



It’s almost 50% faster in single core. That is a big jump in my opinion.


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## Abjection (Oct 13, 2022)

Yes, I see that as far as benchmarks it appears to be 50% faster. However, where I’m concerned is that the single core speed is still clocked at 3.2 per core at base level, and it doesn’t ever boost past that. As to where the i9 still has 3.6 base level and it can boost up to 5. Which, I suspect when compared on say an extremely heavy soft synth using lots of polyphony- that the studio may not actually allow for 50% more of each core, and may even break down first due to the i9 having a technically faster speed cpu per core, as well as the ability to overdrive when needed. Again, I’m not certain of this and I’d love to hear from anyone who has made an upgrade from a relatively new system, such as myself, rather than someone who has upgraded from say a 10 year old system. All of this skepticism comes from a few years back when I bought a dual cpu setup - with two 16 core xeons (32 total) and 64 gigs of ram, I was expecting this to completely outclass my 2012 MacBook Pro, but after using both in real worlds situations the 2012 MacBook was able to easily out perform the xeon machine with soft synths and other single core heavy plugins - due to the Xeon cores all being at a slower clock speed than that of the MacBooks, even though the MacBook had only 4 cores and 16 gigs of ram.


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## Abjection (Oct 13, 2022)

furthermore I’ve just looked more into single core tests and the m1 Ultra scored at an average of 1570, where the i9900k scored at 1343, again these are at base speeds which the Intel is able to boost nearly 2x its base speed, where the m1 does not have the ability to boost at all.


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## mat1 (Oct 13, 2022)

Ignore the clock speeds. Every generation you get a jump in performance at the same clock speed. 5ghz in 2019 is not the same as 5ghz in 2022. 

The current i9 with similar clock speeds gets a single core score of 1990.


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## mat1 (Oct 13, 2022)

Abjection said:


> furthermore I’ve just looked more into single core tests and the m1 Ultra scored at an average of 1570, where the i9900k scored at 1343, again these are at base speeds which the Intel is able to boost nearly 2x its base speed, where the m1 does not have the ability to boost at all.



Single core benchmarks boost the core to its max speed. Using Cinebench scores (the only useful benchmark for us)

i9 9900k - 1284
M1 - 1500

So 20%


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## Abjection (Oct 13, 2022)

Thanks for the input here Matt, have you currently got a mac studio? If so how has you experience been? It’s really hard to tell for me if now is the upgrade time, as I see a lot of mixed reviews from folks in audio. I just recently came across this gear space thread earlier.



https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1386805-apple-m1-silicon-mac-studio-real-world-review-after-5-months.html


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## khollister (Oct 13, 2022)

I have a 16" MBP with the M1 Max - same CPU as you are considering in the Studio. It is fantastic for audio with Logic. Other than VSL Synchron players (which they are working on native M1 versions), everything I use on a regular basis is native. Cubase 12 works quite well as well although it does not use the Apple Rosetta bridge for AU plugins inside a native DAW (Cubase is VST3 only for native), so you need to run everything in Rosetta, which does extract a CPU performance hit.

Some things run far better natively than they ever did on my Intel iMac Pro 10 core as far as CPU load (Spectrasonics and EW OPUS).

If single core CPU overload on a few plugins is your only reason to get a Studio, you may not feel the expense is not justified, although the fan noise and heat differences are huge.

As far as that Gearspace thread, I had a 5.1 Mac Pro and the iMac Pro slaughtered it in CPU and the M1 Max is noticeably better than the iMac Pro was. I don't recall if the guy ever said what DAW he was using, but I suspect he was running everything under Rosetta. Even then, saying it isn't much better than a 5.1 or 6.1 MP is way off of most (all?) of our experiences here. You will se many replies to that thread that echo my experience.

I don't have SD3 or leapwing. I do have Gulfoss and Soothe. Both are now M1 native and I have not noticed a problem although I do not tend to use them on a track in real time but as mix tools, so I'm not much help there either. If you want to provide a preset for one of those that gives you trouble, I will happy to drop it on a live track in Logic and see what happens


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## khollister (Oct 13, 2022)

Oh and don't even try to compare clock speeds, Turbo boost or hyperthreading between Apple Silicon and Intel CPU's. The architectures of the processors couldn't be more different and none of that stuff is comparable as far as performance goes. As a previous poster said, it doesn't even compare to different Intel generations.


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## Abjection (Oct 13, 2022)

khollister said:


> I have a 16" MBP with the M1 Max - same CPU as you are considering in the Studio. It is fantastic for audio with Logic. Other than VSL Synchron players (which they are working on native M1 versions), everything I use on a regular basis is native. Cubase 12 works quite well as well although it does not use the Apple Rosetta bridge for AU plugins inside a native DAW (Cubase is VST3 only for native), so you need to run everything in Rosetta, which does extract a CPU performance hit.
> 
> Some things run far better natively than they ever did on my Intel iMac Pro 10 core as far as CPU load (Spectrasonics and EW OPUS).
> 
> ...


This is extremely helpful - I don’t generally use gulfoss in real time but actually for mixing as well. I guess my main concern is still whether spending 5k on a new computer is going to be a night and day difference from my current setup.

Thanks!


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## khollister (Oct 13, 2022)

Abjection said:


> This is extremely helpful - I don’t generally use gulfoss in real time but actually for mixing as well. I guess my main concern is still whether spending 5k on a new computer is going to be a night and day difference from my current setup.
> 
> Thanks!


I can't begin to say if it is a "night and day" difference because everyone's cost/benefit expectations are different.


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## Abjection (Oct 13, 2022)

khollister said:


> I can't begin to say if it is a "night and day" difference because everyone's cost/benefit expectations are different.


Definitely - do you think for audio it’s worth the cost to go Ultra vs the Max?


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## mat1 (Oct 13, 2022)

Abjection said:


> Thanks for the input here Matt, have you currently got a mac studio? If so how has you experience been? It’s really hard to tell for me if now is the upgrade time, as I see a lot of mixed reviews from folks in audio. I just recently came across this gear space thread earlier.
> 
> 
> 
> https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1386805-apple-m1-silicon-mac-studio-real-world-review-after-5-months.html



I've tested the M1 Max, M1 and M2. Ultimately I settled on the M2 for the form factor with the proviso that I will pick up something more powerful if need be. So far it's been amazing but I'm fully native and work on mostly commercial music.

The M2 generation has higher single core speeds - 1700. I think that would be more immediately noticeable but you could be waiting a while if you need a Studio.

Assuming we get an M2 Pro Mac Mini this month that could be a good option. Pro and Max have the same number of CPU cores but M2 Pro will be limited to 48gb ram.


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## khollister (Oct 13, 2022)

So the Ultra gets you 2 things for audio - double the cores and the option of 128GB of RAM.

If you run huge templates and/or routinely work with hundreds of tracks that you need to keep as live MIDI (not frozen/rendered), then the 20 cores is very beneficial if not essential. Again it depends on what your go-to orchestral sample libs are. 

The RAM is a similar issue - number of tracks, do you work with a disabled track template, does your sample player offer purged samples, and even what the preload can be set to. If you have a large enough internal SSD in the M1 machines to host your sample libs, it can be set to minimum to save RAM due to the internal SSD being so fast.

I went all in on a maxed out M1 Max MBP because I wanted a single machine I could use in the studio or on the road. Keeping 2 machines synchronized with updates, libraries, etc was really tiresome. However, I am not doing this professionally anymore and have no particular time/schedule constraints. I tend to not use huge templates and am not adverse to committing (freezing/rendering to audio) tracks if necessary to save CPU and RAM. 

Even if the Studio Ultra had been available when I purchased my MBP, it would have been a tough call since portability is a big issue for me. Will I eventually upgrade to some theoretical M3 MBP with more CPU performance and more RAM? - sure. But I don't feel particularly handicapped by 10 cores and 64GB now.


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## seclusion3 (Oct 13, 2022)

Ya a 2017 iMac here and can pretty much run my song writing without much problems. But I'm curious what difference the M2 studio will offer so i'm waiting.
Loading up the stereo out with a couple things sends the single core glitching.
My dream is setting up 32 buffer in Logic and forgetting that option is needed from start to finish


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