We Tested the Mac Studio M5 Ultra at €14,000: Monster Power, But Who Is It For?

Announced at the end of August, alongside the compact Mac mini M6, the new Mac Studio M5 Ultra arrived on the market with the muscle to take on the competition. By leveraging 256 GB of unified memory, the variant we’re examining today aims to challenge the DGX Spark for the local management of the largest language models currently available.

With its M5 Ultra chip featuring 36 CPU cores and 80 GPU cores, the Mac Studio we’re examining here sits in a completely different league, especially with 256 GB of unified memory to swallow and process 100-billion-parameter-plus LLMs locally. It’s precisely this capability that we’ve decided to test with this “everything-in-one” machine.

Before diving into performance, here are the exact specifications we were loaned:

In this M5 Ultra configuration — CPU 36-core / 256 GB unified memory / 4 TB SSD — one of the most powerful in Apple’s catalog at present, the Mac Studio is priced at 14,079 euros in France. The machine nevertheless starts at 2,999 euros in the M5 Max CPU 18-core / 36 GB unified memory / 512 GB SSD variant. Note that a 512 GB memory option will be offered with the Mac Studio M5 Ultra, starting from late October 2026, at a price around 25,000 euros at minimum.

Design: the novelties lie elsewhere

9.5 cm tall, 19.7 cm wide, and 3.6 kg; the Mac Studio M5 Ultra preserves the same design we have come to know since its 2022 introduction, and maintains the same weight as its direct predecessor, the Mac Studio M3 Ultra, launched last year. Apple knows it has a solid chassis that has proven itself, so it sticks with the established balance — if you’re hoping for visual novelty, you’ll have to wait a few more years.

In practice, the Mac Studio’s footprint is compact enough to fit under certain displays (it slides just under our Studio Display) or to vanish in a corner of a desk. Its rugged aluminum chassis isn’t the sleekest, but it does the job of staying discreet and providing more internal space than a Mac mini for a fairly sizable cooling system (unchanged from the Mac Studio M3 Ultra), as well as a complete set of ports… with a nice bonus recently.

We find, indeed, four USB-C Thunderbolt 5 ports (up to 120 Gbit/s, with DisplayPort 2.1 support), one 10 Gigabit Ethernet port, two USB-A ports (up to 5 Gbit/s), an HDMI 2.1 output, and a 3.5 mm headset jack at the rear; complemented by two more Thunderbolt 5 ports (up to 120 Gbit/s) at the front, themselves paired with an SDXC card reader (UHS-II). So far, nothing new, except one detail: Thunderbolt 5 RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) clustering.

This feature isn’t entirely specific to the Mac Studio M5 Ultra. It was introduced with macOS Tahoe 26.2 in late 2025 and had started benefiting the Mac Studio M3 Ultra, which also has Thunderbolt 5 ports. It arrives on the Mac Studio M5 Ultra right out of the box, with enough optimizations along the way for Apple to now tout it as a selling point.

RDMA lets a machine read or write directly into another’s memory, bypassing the CPU and the network stack of the distant system. Latency is therefore significantly reduced… unlocking all sorts of possibilities for local handling of very large language models.

The 8-bit quantization (oQ8e) against 4-bit NVFP4 on DGX Spark 128 GB gives our Mac Studio the edge on long documents once warmed up, while remaining more precise in the long run. The DGX Sparks, however, are noticeably more responsive on the first word — roughly four times faster on a short prompt, on average.

We also tried Qwen3-235B-A22B, which reaches about 29 tokens/s on our loan configuration, while Qwen3.5-122B-A10B crosses 30 tokens/s on average, and Nemotron 3.5 Super 120B hits 75 tokens/s. Large language models thus do not scare our Mac Studio, which manages them locally with surprising ease.

That flexibility also comes from the enormous amount of unified memory available. It allows two or three large language models to be loaded into memory at once… or for the user to continue heavy workloads while a 120-billion-parameter (or larger) LLM runs in the background. These 256 GB of RAM are expensive and overkill for anyone not using the machine intensively, but they do provide a royal user experience when pushing the Mac Studio to its limits.

Following a manual activation of RDMA from the settings, up to seven Mac Studio M5 Ultra machines can be connected in a full mesh to pool their RAM and thus manage several large language models with solid performance… Or to deploy a single, gigantic one, such as Kimi K2 Thinking with its thousand-billion parameters, for example. In practice, Apple often promotes groups of four Mac Studio M5 Ultra units for enterprise use, with convincing results for organizations with budgets capable of funding such configurations.

In any case, this year the Mac Studio also includes for the first time an Apple N1 chip, unlocking Wi‑Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 connectivity. A notable advance but one that must be understood in context, as with the Mac mini. The N1 brings only a channel width up to 160 MHz (the Wi‑Fi 7 standard can go up to 320 MHz) and a modulation still at Wi‑Fi 6E levels.

For the rest, Apple only integrates large-core CPU configurations into the M5 Ultra, combining 12 high-performance cores and 24 efficiency cores, crafted on a 3 nm process (likely TSMC’s N3P). No low-power cores are included: our Mac Studio M5 Ultra is clearly built for heavy, intensive tasks rather than energy savings. We’ll assess thermal performance later on.

On the GPU side, the M5 Ultra packs 80 cores, each with a Neural Accelerator. In addition to the 32-core Neural Processing Unit, this setup boosts AI performance versus the previous M3 Ultra. Graphically speaking, Apple is also betting on shader management improvements, a second-generation Dynamic Caching with enhanced ray tracing support. The unified memory finally benefits from a bandwidth of 1.2 To/s — nearly 50% more than the M3 Ultra.

These innovations lift the Mac Studio to a higher power tier and, frankly, it dominates in CPU performance, where the M5 Ultra with its 36 cores delivers impressive horsepower.

Look at Cinebench R24, used to gauge CPU performance across tested processors. The Apple M5 Ultra achieves a single-core score of 201 points and a multi-core score of 3912. On single-core, only the upcoming M6 chip in the Mac mini edges it with a stratospheric 219 points (thanks to the new 2 nm process). Otherwise, the M5 Ultra outperforms every competitor.

The dual bandwidth boost lets it approach (or in some cases exceed) 14 GB/s read/write. That enables moving large data chunks effortlessly… and hundreds of RAW files or 4K/8K video content with ease. Few consumer devices currently offer so much bandwidth.

Yet it is in the local handling of large, let’s say, copious LLMs that the Mac Studio M5 Ultra / 256 GB shines brightest. It easily outclasses NVIDIA’s best DGX Spark configurations in many scenarios. But these machines sit in a different category: our Mac Studio costs roughly twice as much and carries twice as much unified memory.

The few comparisons we’ll venture into should be viewed as rough indicators, to gauge what a Mac Studio M5 Ultra / 256 GB can achieve.

For our tests, we installed locally Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a MoE 125-billion-parameter model (6 billion active parameters per token). Once loaded, this open-source Chinese LLM occupies 128.4 GB of memory (roughly half the available RAM on our test unit).

Consumption and dissipation: (a little) heat, but should we be offended?

We’ve noted earlier that the Mac Studio M5 Ultra does not include energy-efficient cores; it relies on powerful, energy-hungry performance cores. It uses the same cooling system as the Mac Studio M3 Ultra from last year. These tradeoffs lead to perceptible warming, especially at the back of the chassis under heavy use when the CPU and GPU are pushed beyond 80% capacity.

The consumption of the Mac Studio M5 Ultra is controlled. We recorded between 48 and 53 degrees on the back grille. The temperatures remain well managed, and noise from the fan stays under 36–40 dB at a distance of 40 cm from the case — the equivalent of a whisper or the faint breeze of a laptop. Given the performance and compact form factor, it’s hard to fault.

Here is a summary of measured power consumption across different use cases:

• 1 to 2 W at idle
• 4 to 5 W during video streaming
• 55 W on average (175 W max) during local AI processing (Qwen3-235B-A22B-4bit)
• 10 to 30 W in office use with multiple apps open (Slack, Notion, Safari, Chrome, Pages, Claude…)
• Up to 75 W during gaming on Shadow of the Tomb Raider (4K/UHD, Ultra settings)
• Up to 146 W CPU load at 100% under Cinebench R24

Apple Mac Studio M5 Ultra: Clubic’s verdict