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Here’s how the new M5 Max chip did on early Geekbench tests – 9to5Mac

by admin March 5, 2026

by admin March 5, 2026 0 comments

Apple's M5 Pro and M5 Max may be the same chip | Graphic illustrating an M5 Max chip

While the new M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros won’t be available until March 11, the first M5 Max benchmark has already appeared on Geekbench. Here are the results.

New records, if the numbers hold up

As we mentioned a few days ago when an early benchmark purporting to measure the performance of the yet-to-be-released M4 iPad Air surfaced, Geekbench results for unreleased products should always be taken with a grain of salt.

That said, the first test reported for an 18-core M5 Max chip popped up a few hours ago on Geekbench, showing a single-core CPU score of 4,268, and a multi-core CPU score of 29,233.

According to the test results, the benchmark ran on a Mac17,7 model, which would correspond to the upcoming 16-inch MacBook Pro.

If confirmed, those numbers would represent roughly a 9% increase in single-core performance and a 13.7% increase in multi-core performance compared with the 16-core M4 Max in the 2024 16-inch MacBook Pro, which averages 3,915 in single-core and 25,702 in multi-core on Geekbench.

For additional context, the supposed M5 Max results also beat the 14-core M4 Max in the 2025 Mac Studio (4,015 single-core, 23,560 multi-core), as well as the 16-core variant, which averages 4,028 and 26,166.

In practice, once these Macs ship and more users run their own tests, if the numbers hold up as results average out, the M5 Max will top Geekbench’s Mac Benchmarks for both single-core and multi-core performance.

In addition, with a Metal score of 232,718, the M5 Max from this test ranks second on Geekbench’s Metal benchmark, behind the 32-core CPU and 80-core GPU of the M3 Ultra in the 2025 Mac Studio.

Finally, early results purporting to show the performance of the A18 chip in the new MacBook Neo also showed up on Geekbench, scoring 3,461 in single-core CPU, and 8,668 in multi-core CPU, representing roughly a 0.5% increase compared with the iPhone 16 Pro’s A18 silicon.