Reviews for the Mac Studio with M5 Ultra are landing ahead of Monday’s launch, and the story is more about what the chip lets you do than the chip itself. Local AI is the theme running through nearly every review.
Price is the other constant, this is Apple’s most expensive Mac Studio configuration yet, and reviewers are split on whether that’s justified outside of professional AI and creative work. We covered the jump in specs against the previous chip in early M5 Ultra benchmark leaks, and the early numbers held up. Here’s what each outlet found.
Engadget Scores the Mac Studio M5 Ultra an 8.9 Out of 10
Engadget measured a Geekbench 7 multi-core score of 52,185, up from 39,145 on the outgoing M3 Ultra, alongside disk speeds of 14 gigabytes per second write and 11 gigabytes per second read, nearly double the previous generation. A nine-minute 4K timeline exported in just over a minute, and the review ran four 7K RAW tracks with color correction at once without dropping frames.
On local AI, the review pointed to the machine’s ability to run models with billions of parameters entirely on-device, transcribing a 70-minute podcast in 18 seconds using Mac Whisper, about a quarter of the time the M4 Max needed. The base M5 Ultra now starts at $5,500, and the review called the jump to a fully configured $11,299 unit worth it only for hardcore AI developers and studios, with the M5 Max offering better value for most creators.
Tom’s Hardware Puts the M5 Ultra Up Against Nvidia’s DGX Spark
Tom’s Hardware found the M5 Ultra’s prompt processing speed beat Nvidia’s DGX Spark outright, with token throughput running nearly four times higher. Against AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 9980X, results were mixed. The Mac Studio won on single-core work and video transcoding, while the 64-core Threadripper pulled ahead on CPU-based rendering.
With 1.2 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth and up to 256GB of unified memory, the review said the machine can hold very large models, or several smaller ones, on a single node. Its test configuration ran $12,299 with 256GB of memory and 4TB of storage, and the review’s main complaint was that gaming performance still trails dedicated GPU systems, with memory and storage upgrades priced high and locked in at purchase.
MacStories Calls It a Dream Machine for Local AI Agents
MacStories’ Federico Viticci tested a 256GB configuration and measured prompt processing at roughly 2.5 times the speed of the M3 Ultra, hitting 2,057 to 2,771 tokens per second versus 861 to 1,112 previously. Token generation improved by 54 to 70 percent on average, and at a 256K token context length, the M5 Ultra held 74.7 tokens per second against the M3 Ultra’s 38.6.
He ran local AI agents around the clock for 99 days to help organize research, at no ongoing API cost, and said the jump in memory bandwidth, from 819 gigabytes per second to 1.2 terabytes per second, is what makes that possible. Nvidia’s RTX 5090 still processes prompts faster in raw terms, but he pointed to the M5 Ultra’s unified memory, lower noise, and better sustained performance as the bigger advantage for long AI workloads.
Tom’s Guide Names the Mac Studio M5 Ultra Its Editor’s Choice
Tom’s Guide gave the Mac Studio M5 Ultra its Editor’s Choice award, recording a Geekbench 6 multi-core score of 37,777 against 26,966 for the M4 Max, and Blackmagic SSD speeds of 13,902 megabytes per second read and 14,283 write, more than double the previous generation. A complex 4K video conversion finished in 1 minute 20 seconds.
Even Apple Silicon-optimized games ran well, with Cyberpunk 2077 holding a consistent 60 frames per second at 5K resolution, though the review noted it still lags behind dedicated gaming PCs. Its complaint was squarely about cost, calling the machine extremely expensive and recommending the far cheaper M6 Mac mini for anyone without a professional workload to justify it.
To go alongside the written reviews, here is a selection of some of our favorite reviews on YouTube:
Our Take
What stands out across these reviews is how little the conversation is about the Mac Studio as a general-purpose computer anymore. Every review here framed it around local AI workloads first, and the benchmarks back that up. A 2.5x jump in prompt processing and a 50 percent bump in memory bandwidth are the kind of gains that change what’s actually possible to run at home instead of in the cloud.
I think the SSD finding is the most interesting thread here, mostly because nobody was asking for it. A 2.6x read speed improvement is the sort of upgrade that quietly makes every other task faster, even for people who never touch a local language model.
The price is real, and I wouldn’t argue with anyone who says $5,500 for the base M5 Ultra is a lot to ask. But for the specific group of buyers this machine is built for, running large models locally without ongoing API costs, the math changes fast once you compare it to months of cloud compute bills.
The Mac Studio with M5 Ultra starts at $5,500, and a fully configured model with 512GB of memory runs well past $11,000. It’s already picked up its first pre-order deals on Amazon ahead of launch.
