M5 Max with inconsistent performance and throttling issues - Apple MacBook Pro 14 Review

High power limits also result in loud fans and the power adapter is also insufficient. It should not surprise anyone that a 96 Watt power adapter might be struggling when the M5 Max alone can draw 96 Watts at the beginning of the stress test. This also happens while gaming, where you need the High Power mode to get consistent results and the battery level dropped by around 10 % when we played the native Cyberpunk 2077 version. Apple also limits the power input to 97 Watts, even if you use a 140 Watt PSU from or a generic 180W USB-C charger. Considering our measurements on the larger MacBook Pro 16 with the M5 Pro, we suspect the MacBook Pro 14 with the M5 Max will actually consume more than 140 Watts in peak load scenarios, so it has to use the battery as well.

Still, even with these issues, the MBP 14 is still one of the most powerful 14-inch laptops and the two main rivals are the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, which is available with the mobile RTX 5080 or the Asus ProArt PX13 with the AMD Strix Halo Ryzen AI Max+ 395 & Radeon 8060S (also 128 GB RAM), but the screens on both models are just not comparable to the excellent Mini-LED panel of the MacBook Pro 14 and both alternatives do not stand a chance in terms of CPU performance, either.

All in all, this is still a very good multimedia laptop, but the new M5 Pro is just a better fit for the 14-inch chassis. If you want or need the M5 Max, you should be aware that the performance in the 14-inch model will be lower compared to the MacBook Pro 16.

Apple offers a comprehensive environmental report including data about the CO₂ emissions as well as recycled contents. The following image shows exemplary data for the base model of the MacBook Pro 16 M5 Pro and the highest shown MacBook Pro 14 model with the M5-Max-SKU (32-core GPU, 36 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD) has a carbon footprint of 261 kg CO₂e.

The MacBook Pro offers three different performance modes: Automatic, High Power & Low Power and we have summarized the effects of the three different modes in the table below. All three modes are also available on battery power with the same performance figures. If you want the maximum CPU and GPU performance, you must use the High Power mode, so we used it for our tests as well. However, the maximum power limits shown are only reached for one or two seconds on the 14-inch model and it will almost immediately throttle down. While the GPU performance was reproducible, we had issues with the CPU performance and encountered Cinebench 2024 Multi scores ranging between ~1400 and the maximum of 2073 points with the consumption dropping below 40 Watts at times, even though the testing conditions for the runs were pretty much identical. We are not really sure what is going on here, maybe Apple will fix this behavior with a software update. As of now, you will not get very consistent CPU performance under sustained workloads.

The new M5 Max offers 18 processor cores and we have already talked about the technical details in our CPU analysis. The single-core performance is excellent and we see an advantage of around 12 % in single-core tests and similar to all the other M5 SoCs. The multi-core performance is a different story though. Yes, the performance in Geekbench with very shot peak load phases is 14 % higher compared to M4 Max, but if we look at the Cinebench 2024 Multi test, which takes a couple of minutes, the performance is pretty much identical to the M4 Max. As mentioned before, the multi-core CPU performance was also not stable and varied between 1400 and more than 2000 points (including everything in-between) from one run to another, despite similar circumstances. We are not sure why the M5 Max performs this way and we did not experience these issues on the new MacBook Pro 16 with M5 Pro. During the 30-minute stress test of Cinebench 2024 Multi, the performance dropped by 24 %.

The subjective performance impression is excellent, but to be fair, this is the case for every modern MacBook with the M5 chip since the high single-core performance (in combination with fast SSD storage) is a key factor for everyday workloads. With our maxed-out review unit (128 GB RAM) you will not have any troubles during heavy multi-tasking and there are not many other devices with this much RAM out there, usually only AMD Strix Halo systems like the Asus ProArt PX13. The memory performance stayed pretty much the same compared to the previous M4 Max SoC.

Apple now uses PCIe 5.0 SSDs and the performance of our review unit with the 8 TB option is excellent with transfer rates of up to 20 GB/s. It is also one of the few 14-inch laptops with up to 8 TB storage.

Our review unit is equipped with the fastest 40-core M5 Max GPU and we talked about the technical details in our GPU analysis. The GPU draws up to 72 Watts under load, but only for 1-2 seconds before it drops to 55 and later to just 44 Watts in High Power mode (60/32W in Automatic mode). We see an advantage of 8-14 % advantage over the old M4 Max in the 3DMark tests and the M5 Max is also close to the mobile RTX 5080 in the ROG Zephyrus G14. In shorter benchmarks like Cinebench 2024 or Geekbench, the performance advantage over the M4 Max is even bigger. The larger MacBook Pro 16 with the M5 Max should perform even better in the GPU tests.

Sustained workloads will result in some throttling, even in High Power mode with 92.6 % (74.99 % in Automatic mode) as shown in the screenshots below.