I compared Apple’s Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 10 Windows workstations and I am truly shocked by what I found desire.athow@futurenet.com (Desire Athow) | usagoldmines.com

The 2025 iteration of the Mac Studio marks a new era in personal computing for Apple as it pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved, using what is essentially a bigger version of Intel’s now-defunct next unit of computing (NUC).

I pitted its full-fat, top-end version, the M3 Ultra with a 16TB SSD and 512GB of RAM against the competition to get a rough idea of how good a bargain it is. Unsurprisingly, it easily competes against some of the best workstation PCs in the world.

There’s a trio of ThreadRipper rigs, seven Xeon workstations (across three generations) and for good measure, Nvidia’s magnificent Digits and three of Apple’s very own PCs, the Mac Mini (M4 Pro), the Mac Pro (M2 Ultra) and a less capable version of the Mac Studio (M4 Max).

The entire table is at the end of this article. Note that some cells are empty because I simply don’t have the information at hand (e.g. size of some workstations, performance of Digits etc).

Credit where credit is due, Apple managed to deliver something I was not expecting it to do anytime soon: 512GB of unified memory in a computer.

That stroke of genius meant moving the comparison to Intel Xeon and AMD ThreadRipper Pro systems, far more expensive professional platforms compared to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core ones.

As well as zeroing on the workstation vertical, it also firmly signals Apple’s ambitions to be a major player in the red-hot local AI hardware market.

(Worth checking out my article published in June 2023 where I suggested that the Mac Studio would replace the Mac Pro (and make PC vendors nervous).

I analysed the prices of these systems (using the most up to date data I could find) and there’s no two way of putting it.

A $14,000 bargain if you’re after memory

The Apple Mac Studio Ultra, even at more than $14,000 is a bargain if you’re looking for as much system memory as possible, at $28 per GB.

That’s a bit less than Puget Systems and almost a third of what you’d pay for a maxed-out Mac Mini (or half the Apple Mac Pro with its puny 192GB RAM).

Most importantly, it is far, far cheaper than the likes of Dell or HP; turns out Windows workstations with half a terabyte RAM, don’t come cheap.

Remember that Apple uses unified memory which has a much higher bandwidth (800GB/s) than DDR5 memory (even across eight memory modules).

It delivers the type of performance you’d expect from an integrated GPU; as Servethehome’s Patrick Kennedy puts it, “The cost is high in the context of a workstation, but it is cheap when you compare it to NVIDIA’s cost per GB of memory”.

Remember as well that I have configured this workstation with a 16TB onboard storage; no other major player has access to that sort of storage unless you resort to RAID-0 across multiple much smaller SSDs.

There’s also the fact that it comes with 10GbE LAN by default as well as Thunderbolt 5, a data transfer technology not available to any other workstation at the time of writing, which, in due time, will pave the way for innovative external peripherals.

I also looked at 3 other composite metrics, all looking at processor performance (based on the popular Geekbench 6*) and not surprisingly, Apple excelled in all three: GeekBench point per dollar, Geekbench point per core and Geekbench point per volume.

The M4 devices (Mac Mini and Mac Studio) had the cheapest performance per $, at about $0.20, that’s almost 1/8th of the most expensive one (the HP G4).

It also had the highest performance per core (1623, 5X faster than the slowest processor, an Intel Xeon) and the highest performance per unit volume (more than 140x compared to the worst entry).

GPU details remain a mystery

The big unknown remains the official GPU metrics as it is difficult to gauge Apple’s graphics performance across different systems-on-chip as Apple doesn’t divulge additional data beyond core numbers.

For the sake of simplicity, I chose the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada Generation as the default card – where possible – as it was the cheapest professional graphics card that came with 16GB of RAM. Only one entry used the more expensive RTX 4000 Ada Generation with 20GB of RAM.

Tech publication, TechPowerUp, estimates that the RTX 2000 AG should be slightly slower than an RTX 3060.

The Apple M3 Ultra scores just under 130,000 marks on the popular OpenCL Geekbench tests, that’s 50% faster than the RTX 2000 AG, so for a more balanced comparison, readers may want to substitute a more powerful (and expensive) card like the NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada Generation.

* Geekbench 6 entries are sadly not averaged. So I picked what I considered to be the median on the first page of each CPU. Your mileage may vary.

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