Downright awful M4 Max performance - seemingly worse than an M4 Pro - Anyone else?

[MidwestMiku]

Hello everyone. This is my first Macbook ever. I went with 14 cores/36GB of Ram, 32 core GPU.
The performance is fairly bad. Cinebench puts me below an M4 Pro with very similar specs (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/my-cinebench-results-m4-pro-24gb-512-gb-ssd.2442413/)

Others with an M4 Max are reporting much better performance on various applications, namely games like FFXIV using custom clients like XIVonMac.
At one point someone with an M4 Base Mini was outdoing my M4 Max on certain applications.
Is your M4 Max by chance also running terribly? Any ideas on what this might be?
This is using Sequoia 15.1.
Tried both High Performance and normal.

Is this Macbook a dud, or is there something I'm missing?
Please let me know if your performance is similarly bad.

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

The M4 Max MacBook Pro 14" should be avoided because it has thermal throttling. Buy the 16" instead.

 

[raythompsontn]

The M4 Max MacBook Pro 14" should be avoided because it has thermal throttling

That is a non-issue. How many times is the CPU going to be maxed out such that it starts throttling? In real life, rarely. I can max the CPU on my M4 Pro doing a Lightroom import when Lightroom is rendering previews. How often does that happen? Maybe twice a week for very large imports in excess of 1K images.

Don't go by benchmarks that are deliberately designed to stress a system to the maximum. These are not real world uses and will never be real world uses. Rendering long 8K videos may cause throttling. Those users that do that kind of stressing of a system know who they are and will configure as such. The normal, average, user, such throttling is not an issue.

 

[Gnattu]

Your binned M4 Max is not more powerful than than M4 Pro in CPU performance and that is normal.

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

Only the 16" 40 cores GPU is really fast, but also very expensive.

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]