The current 14-inch MacBook Pro (approx 2129 euros at Amazon) with an Apple M1 Pro chip already has one in our test Top Award with the result “very good” 93 percent. But how does the M1 Max SoC fare with almost twice the transistors in a compact 14-inch case?
The 32-core GPU in the MacBook Pro 14 is throttled by 35 percent
In a Blender rendering test by MaxTech (see also the video below), 32 cores have virtually no advantage over 24 cores, while there is wonderful scaling from 16 to 24 cores, with an increase in performance of 52 percent. A similar picture emerges with video encoding:
You lose 36 percent of the performance compared to the MacBook Pro 16 with the same 32-core GPU (approx 3849 euros at Amazon), which is simply due to the GPU throttling by 35 percent under combined continuous load. But even with pure graphics load, the clock drops by 13 percent, which is reflected exactly in the FPS in the Tomb Raider benchmark, for example:
24 cores offer the more worthwhile variant
The MacBook Pro 14 inch with 24 compared to 16 graphics cores is particularly interesting thanks to the relatively low surcharge of 240 euros: Because not only does the full performance scaling take place here, but also RAM bandwidth (400 GB/s), encoder as well as ProRes encoders double up, so encoding is 1.5x to 2x faster. Nevertheless, everyone has to decide for themselves whether the additional performance is really needed, especially since 32 GB of RAM must be selected (another 460 euros), if not already done.
Battery life greatly reduced?
The battery life of the MBP 14 with 32 GPU cores is said to be almost 50 percent worse under load compared to the 14 core. With conventional web surfing, however, the difference – our tests on the 16-inch MacBook Pros with 16 and 32 cores as a reference – should be between 10 and 15 percent.
My fascination with computers began at preschool age. Quickly after Windows 95 and 486 came the Internet, which has now completely gripped me – and has never completely let go. At the age of 11 I assembled my own PC, but since 2016 I have switched completely to notebooks: Because of this, as a traveling freelancer, I can have my entire PC with me everywhere. However, I’m not a full-time N3rd and I’m passionate about playing drums, lifting weights and being in our Finnish log cabin!
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