I have a new Mac Studio M2 Ultra, and I noticed in some ways performance was slower than on my much older Mac Pro. I ran Geekbench 6 and found the scores to be noticeably below average. I also noticed that the CPU seems to be running slower than it should be (2.85GHz instead of 3.68). I'm wondering if anyone has any insight as to why this may be. Is it possible there is something wrong with the machine?
Mac Studio (2023)
Hi Grant Benner-Alder, thanks for your reply. Indeed GeekBench was the only thing running when I did the test, and was run from the applications folder. No virus scanners or anything like that. I had 3 monitors connected during the test, 2 at 1920x1080, the other at 3440x1440.
Any thoughts? I've since noticed that the Ghz speed seems to fluctuate, I'm guessing it gears up/down depending on demand. But the single-core performance in particular being lower than M1 chips seems wrong to me.
By far the biggest demand for memory bandwidth is fetching data for displays.
From a computer architecture point of view, the MacBook Pro is a very specialized computer with big memory array. "Unified memory" means a boatload of its memory bandwidth is available for screen refresh, and what is left over might be usable for computation.
With one display active, no impact to a modest impact on memory bandwidth would be seen. With many larger displays active, you risk crowding the CPU off the memory bus, and (effectively) reducing compute speed, depending on exactly what method is being used to determine CPU speed.
Try the test again with only one display of modest to low resolution connected. Readers would be very interested if your CPU speed changes.
Good morning,
I am stepping in to ask isocat to test in Geekbench after rebooting the computer, making sure it has not gone to a stop in the meantime.
I have the same problem. Apple has already replaced a first computer for me because they were finding precisely the problem but the diagnostics were not reporting hardware defects, but nothing has changed. So it is a firmware/software quesatione that will hopefully be resolved with an upcoming update. They are investigating, in short....
However, there are several of us who are experiencing this.
I for the time being prevent the computer from going to stop when the monitor is turned off and everything works fine.
Best regards.
Disconnecting monitors made no notable difference. However as painful as it is to admit, I had not tried a simple reboot. After rebooting, I am getting geekbench results in line with the average scores. So it seems when the machine goes to sleep it does not wake up fully... I guess I can relate.
Hopefully this will be fixed with future firmware or OS update.
Thank you for the info, bubeli!
Good morning,
small update on the situation.
After upgrading to Ventura 13.5, the problem seems to have been resolved and my Mac Studio Ultra can now more safely go to sleep and wake up without loss of performance.
Best regards.
What hardware is connected during the testing, including what display(s) and their resolution?
Did you quit absolutely everything possible before launching Geek bench? anything running in the background is likely to take cycles away from testing. Are you running any Virus scanners, a VPN, or file-syncers?
Did you take a moment to move geekBench.app to the /Applications or /Applications/Utilities folder before running? That could affect the speed at which the App can run.
Do you see any great diff in the individual ratings?
Mac Studio M2 Ultra - Geekbench score below average
