78% of Mac Studio buyers choose the M4 Max. Our Dreadnought workstation has more RAM, more bandwidth, and costs $300 less — and it’s upgradeable. We use the chips that make your workflow faster, not the chips with the biggest numbers on the box.
"Phenomenal memory and storage — Get up to 128 GB unified memory with M4 Max."
The base M4 Max ships with 36 GB. To reach 96 GB costs $2,599. 128 GB costs $2,999. None of it is upgradeable — ever. And that memory is shared between CPU and GPU — when your GPU is rendering, your CPU starves. We have three 64 GB workstations starting at $1,299 — all upgradeable to 128 GB starting at $1,399, and to 256 GB beyond that. Any time. By you.
"Plays it cool and quiet. Within the 7.7-inch-square Mac Studio enclosure lies a thermal system designed to let M4 Max fly through intensive tasks."
The M4 Max in the Mac Studio is the same laptop chip Apple puts in the MacBook Pro. In the laptop, it hits 106–108°C and thermally throttles within a minute under sustained load. Our Xeon E5 series are enterprise data center processors designed to sustain 100% utilization indefinitely under rack conditions. We pair them with liquid cooling and open-source thermal management software consuming less than 0.01% of system resources. They don’t throttle.
"Up to 546 GB/s memory bandwidth."
Shared — and that figure is the premium $2,499 model. The base Mac Studio M4 Max at $1,999 delivers 410 GB/s, serving both CPU and GPU through one unified bus. Our Dreadnought delivers 76.8 GB/s to the CPU and 384 GB/s to the GPU — simultaneously, independently, zero contention. 461 GB/s of non-competing bandwidth — edging out the Mac’s 410 GB/s, with every byte reserved for its dedicated pool. Add the dual-GPU upgrade (Dreadnought+) and it reaches ~945 GB/s across three independent pools.
"Choose from tens of thousands of apps optimized for Apple silicon — including DaVinci Resolve Studio, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Photoshop."
Those same apps run on Windows — often faster. DaVinci Resolve uses CUDA and OpenCL natively. Blender supports OptiX on NVIDIA GPUs (60–66% faster ray tracing). Premiere Pro's Mercury Playback Engine prefers CUDA. Metal has no equivalent to NVIDIA's dedicated RT cores. Our Ironclad ships with an RTX 3060 for CUDA-dependent workflows. Every machine includes Office 2019 Pro+.
Blender verdict: Cycles is ray tracing, and ray tracing has a king — NVIDIA OptiX. Dedicated RT cores plus the OptiX AI denoiser mean production-quality output at a fraction of the samples, with 12 GB dedicated VRAM for complex scenes. The Ironclad at $1,499 ships with an RTX 3060 purpose-built for this — beating even the $2,499 M4 Max 40-core on production throughput, because the NVIDIA stack is the mature ecosystem Blender was designed around. Need even more raw throughput? The Dreadnought+ ($1,999) and Banshee Workstation+ ($1,599) add dual-AMD HIP plus a 16C/12C CPU for parallel compositing — the power-user path for the most complex scenes.
Resolve verdict: OpenCL levels the field — Metal has no edge here. The M4 Max base at $1,999 only ships with 36 GB of shared memory; temporal noise reduction on a complex grade will hit that ceiling. Our Dreadnought at $1,699 delivers 64 GB with a dedicated 12 GB VRAM pool and ISV-certified drivers, at $300 less. Need the top of the throughput chart? The Dreadnought+ at $1,999 pairs the WX 9100 (16 GB HBM2) with the 6700 XT Pro and a 16C E5-2697A v4 — the WX 9100 takes the color math while the 6700 XT Pro handles the timeline preview, no resource contention. Combined, Dreadnought+ delivers ~945 GB/s across three independent pools — 73% more memory bandwidth than the $2,499 M4 Max, 15% more than the $3,999 M3 Ultra. For $1,999.
Premiere verdict: CUDA wins here, and the Ironclad at $1,499 is purpose-built for it. RTX 3060 drives Mercury Playback Engine, NVENC accelerates H.264/H.265 exports, and 64 GB of dedicated DDR4-2133 holds complex multi-stream timelines without paging. The M4 Max base at $1,999 offers 36 GB of shared memory and no CUDA — $500 more, less capable for Premiere. For OpenCL Premiere pipelines, the Dreadnought or Banshee WS deliver 64 GB DDR4 and ISV-certified drivers.
After Effects verdict: At base spec, our $1,499–$1,699 builds deliver 64 GB and ~62 GB available — more than twice what the $1,999 Mac hands you after macOS takes its cut. Add the 128 GB BTO upgrade and you’re at ~126 GB for $1,699–$1,999 — versus Apple's $2,599 to reach 96 GB. Every BTO RAM upgrade is user-installable later. Apple’s never is.
Photoshop verdict: The M4 Max wins single-core performance — 2025 silicon beats 2013–2016 silicon on per-core speed, and we’re honest about that. But Apple’s base Mac at $1,999 ships with 36 GB, and macOS consumes ~10 GB of that at idle. Our builds ship with 64 GB at prices from $1,299 — every layer in RAM, no disk swap. Apple wins per-filter speed. We win file size ceiling — for $700 less.
The right chip for batch rendering: Core count matters for large files in apps like Blender or Resolve. The M3 Ultra’s 20 performance cores are a real advantage there — but it costs $3,999. Our Dreadnought+ (dual-GPU + 16C CPU included) at $1,999 delivers comparable Resolve throughput by offloading the heavy work to dedicated GPU compute — and it scores 85 on our aggregate Capability Score versus Mac’s 68. We give you more — for 50% less.
Every RR core is a performance core running at a published, verified clock speed. The M4 Max base at $1,999 has 10 performance cores at ~4.5 GHz turbo. Our Ironclad has 8 at 3.5 GHz turbo — at $500 less — with 64 GB of RAM and a CUDA GPU the Mac can’t touch. The Dreadnought at $1,699 adds a faster base clock (3.2 GHz), DDR4-2667, and an upgradeable dual-GPU path. Need more? The Dreadnought+ at $1,999 bundles the dual-GPU upgrade with a free jump to the 16-core E5-2697A v4 — matching the base Mac Studio on price while scoring 85 to its 60 on our Capability Score chart. Per-core Apple wins on speed. We win on everything else.
How the comparison works: Windows 11 Home runs a bloated background process stack by default. RR Turbo v6 strips that down by ~25%, landing at roughly 2–3 GB RAM at idle (varies with installed user apps). macOS runs WindowServer, kernel_task, Spotlight, iCloud sync, Apple Intelligence, and telemetry that cannot be disabled — consuming ~10 GB at idle. That’s 7–8 GB Apple takes before you’ve opened a single app. On a 36 GB Mac, you’re working with ~26 GB before macOS is done helping you.
Ironclad and Dreadnought are not shelf products — each one is sourced and assembled to order. Lead time is typically 1–2 weeks. Contact us to configure and confirm availability →
Workflow-matched CPUs. Independent memory pools. Dedicated VRAM. ECC where it matters. Liquid cooling. A debloated OS. Upgradeable everything. 64 GB from $1,299 — upgradeable to 128 GB from $1,399.
Need a small-footprint professional workstation instead? See the SFF Workstation — hand-fabricated, ISV-certified, $749.