Mac Studio Upgrades GPU, RAM or Storage or Go With Base Model

[Sossity]

I am intersted in the new mac studio desktop, and I can configure one from the apple education store. Should get any upgrades? and if so which ones would be the best in the long run?

I use my macs for many things; Google Chrome, with multiple Google accounts open, and multiple tabs open in web pages, web apps, virtual machines with Parallels desktop running Windows with Microsoft Office, and AutoCAD, photography, a little video editing and conversion, as well as audio extraction and conversion.

Would any of the upgrades be worth the extra cost? or would the base model work for my needs?

I was looking at RAM, but it is quite expensive, while upgrading the GPU and or storage costs a little less.

 

[theluggage]

Would any of the upgrades be worth the extra cost? or would the base model work for my needs?

If you're going to be running VMs and/or installing large "pro" apps then I'd suggest upgrading to 1TB storage. Other storage requirements can be met with cheaper external drives.

Apart from that, the base model is pretty powerful and would most likely be more than adequate for your "bit of everything" needs. I wouldn't upgrade beyond that unless you have specific requirements for those features.

You need to be aware that you can only run the ARM version of Windows using Parallels on M1 Macs, which has its own x86 emulation but there are some restrictions - MS Office should be fine, but you should check about AutoCAD.

 

[MarkC426]

MS Office and AutoCad both have Mac versions....🤔

 

[Sossity]

MS Office and AutoCad both have Mac versions....🤔

Ok, yeah I knew about office, but I did not know so much about a mac auto-cad, does it work as well? I read that it lacks features of the windows version.

 

[jakebrosy]

We do video/photo/audio editing (some 4K video with 8 cameras), some compositing, some 3D work, lots of DTP...and we bought a base model Max, a mid-level Max (64GB/1TB) and a base model Ultra.

Even with 4K/8 Stream video editing we haven't found any ceilings on ANY of the Mac Studios. We barely see CPU/GPU/RAM get close to 50% usage--even on the base model. We just can't find anything to truly stress test them.

And it's frustrating as H-E-double-toothpicks! I have always been able to stall any MacPro we brought in the door. Dammit Apple, you've foiled me!

 

[HDFan]

I'd look at the things that you are doing on your current Macs and figure out where the bottlenecks are. Are you running out of cpu, gpu, memory, storage?

On my studio I'm using 30 GB of memory for 3 backup services and 1 ~8 GB Photoshop instance. One Amazon tab I have open in Safari is 1.67 GB. Total memory in use is ~83 GB with maybe 25 apps open and a lot of Safari tabs. This may be extreme so you need to understand just how heavy your usage is and which resources will be impacted.

Ram and storage being under configured can have a significant impact, even crashing your system in extreme cases.

CPU and GPU configuration are more of a convenience. I.E. fewer of them, depending on what you do, the longer you have to wait. If you are rendering 1 hour 4K movies you may want to get the most gpus and cpus that you can afford.

 

[michelb76]

Chrome will still suck your RAM compared to Safari, so if you can't switch browsers, then maybe get some extra RAM.

I have a Studio Max, 64GB, 1TB. (coming from a beefed up hackintosh) Love it, takes every workload with ease. I do video editing in 4K, photoshop, I have tons of tabs open and several other apps like Teams, Slack, Mail, other Office apps. I hardly ever reboot, no need for it.

Difference between a Max and an Ultra is not worth the price, in my opinion. upgrading the GPU also brings marginal benefits for most workloads. Pretty sure most people can get away with 32GB RAM for most workloads.
The larger internal storage options are way faster than the smaller options.

Since you mention Windows VM's, running Intel Windows VM's is super slow. I run ARM Windows in UTM, but it means I cannot install most Windows apps. So check out what you need for this before you buy.

 

[Sossity]

Chrome will still suck your RAM compared to Safari, so if you can't switch browsers, then maybe get some extra RAM.

I have a Studio Max, 64GB, 1TB. (coming from a beefed up hackintosh) Love it, takes every workload with ease. I do video editing in 4K, photoshop, I have tons of tabs open and several other apps like Teams, Slack, Mail, other Office apps. I hardly ever reboot, no need for it.

Difference between a Max and an Ultra is not worth the price, in my opinion. upgrading the GPU also brings marginal benefits for most workloads. Pretty sure most people can get away with 32GB RAM for most workloads.
The larger internal storage options are way faster than the smaller options.

Since you mention Windows VM's, running Intel Windows VM's is super slow. I run ARM Windows in UTM, but it means I cannot install most Windows apps. So check out what you need for this before you buy.

Ok, thanks for this input, what is UTM referred to here? Do larger capacity drives help with speed? I was not aware that hard drive space can affect speed.

 

[kschendel]

Ok, thanks for this input, what is UTM referred to here? Do larger capacity drives help with speed? I was not aware that hard drive space can affect speed.

UTM is an emulator and virtual machine host. Hard drive space doesn't affect speed, but the Studio has SSD's; SSD space can affect speed, at least on paper. Smaller drives with fewer / larger flash memory chips may not use the max parallelism that the SSD controller can support. Whether you can actually tell the difference in a real life setting, as opposed to artificial benchmarks, is arguable. My experience is that sequential read / write benchmark numbers are very close to meaningless unless your workload actually does multi-gigabyte sequential transfers -- and most don't.