Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max review
Performance and benchmarks
The iPhone 17 Pro Max is powered by the new 3nm Apple A19 Pro chipset, which is the most capable of the current generation. It's a step above the A19 in the base model iPhone 17, and, confusingly, above the A19 Pro inside the iPhone Air.
On the iPhone 17 Pro models, the A19 Pro SoC packs a 6-core CPU (2 performance clocked at 4.26GHz and 4 efficiency cores ticking at 2.6GHz) and a 6-core GPU with one more core than the Air's A19 Pro and support for hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing.
A 16-core Neural Engine boosts performance of Apple Intelligence tasks. The iPhone 17 Pros got a new vapor chamber plate that alongside the aluminum body, should finally improve cooling and, in turn, sustained performance.
Apple says the proprietary alloy it uses is a big improvement over the Titanium of the previous generation iPhone Pros, and the overall cooling enables 40% better performance when under prolonged stress.
Both the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max use the N1 Apple-designed networking chip, with support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and Thread.
The new iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max pack 12 GB of LPDDR5X 8533 RAM, up from 8 GB LPDDR5X 7500 RAM on the outgoing Pro Max. The base storage is 256 GB NVMe, and you can opt for 512 GB and 1 TB on both Pro models. There is also a 2 TB option exclusive to the Pro Max.
The iPhone 17 Pro models offer tri-band Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, support Bluetooth 6.0, and Ultra Wideband via Gen 2 chip. Also worth noting is the USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 port, which supports up to 10Gbps transfer speeds, DisplayPort and USB Host mode.
And now, let's see some benchmarks! The single-core CPU performance is up 10% compared to the 16 Pro Max's A18 Pro chip, while the multi-core is gains 20%. The performance gap between the A19 Pro CPU and the A17 Pro CPU is quite large, so it seems updating from the 2-year old iPhone 15 Pro models makes sense.
The AnTuTu scores of the 17 Pro Max is even more impressive with a compound score that is miles ahead of the iPhone 15 Pro Max and a lot better than the 16 Pro Max.
GeekBench 6
- Multi-core
- Single-core
iPhone 17 Pro Max
iPhone 17
iPhone 16 Pro Max
iPhone 16
iPhone 15 Pro Max
iPhone 14 Pro Max
iPhone 15
AnTuTu 10
iPhone 17 Pro Max
iPhone 17
iPhone 16 Pro Max
iPhone 16
iPhone 15 Pro Max
iPhone 14 Pro Max
iPhone 15
The 3D Mark benchmark put the graphics performance of the iPhone 17 Pro Max on par with the recent bunch of top-tier Android phones, but at the top of the chart when it comes to raytracing.
3DMark
- Wild Life Extreme (2160p)
- Solar Bay (1440p)
Galaxy S25 Ultra
OnePlus 13
Xiaomi 15 Ultra
vivo X200 Pro
iPhone 17 Pro Max
iPhone 17
Galaxy S25 FE
iPhone 15 Pro Max
iPhone 14 Pro Max
iPhone 15
Update, 30 Sept, 2025: Over the course of the ongoing review process for the other iPhones, we ran some more tests on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, and its sustained load results changed for the better - meaningfully so. Its APSI Bench CPU stress test result reached 88%, which is pretty great. The 3DMark Wild Life Stress returned a 67% results that's more into run of the mill territory.
APSI Bench CPU test • 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test
We ran the same tests on the iPhone 16 Pro Max and we got 77% for CPU stability and 65% in the GPU test. So indeed, there is some improvement, particularly when taking into account that the Apple A19 Pro is a more powerful piece of hardware to begin with. But we are certainly not seeing the 40% improvement promised by Apple.
The Apple A19 Pro is one of the most powerful chipsets on the market, that is for sure. But Apple tried to convince us the switch to aluminum will make this iPhone offer better stability than the last year models and things are more nuanced than that.
