Mac Studio local LLM benchmarks: M5 Ultra vs Max for Qwen Flash-Next
Mxmtm · reddit · 2026-08-30
A detailed hardware comparison for running local LLMs on Mac Studio (M5 Ultra 96GB vs Max 128GB vs 64GB). The analysis covers Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.8-Flash-Next performance. Key findings: 64GB is non-viable for Flash-Next; 128GB Max runs Q4KXL (93.5% retention); 96GB Ultra runs IQ4XS (91.1%). The author debates bandwidth vs. VRAM trade-offs and seeks user feedback on SSD offloading, quantization quality, and GPU core impact.
More from Infra
- NVIDIA launches RTX Spark for local AI on Windows PCs — ostrisai · 2026-10-16
- SkyRL ships Day-0 RL support for Beam with +62% LoRA decode throughput in vLLM — vllm_project · 2026-10-16
- DFlash2 delivers up to 3.03x decode-only speedup for Beam across five benchmarks — vllm_project · 2026-10-16
- vLLM's Beam serving kernels cut GB200 forward time from 8.15 to 6.47 ms at TP8 batch 128 — vllm_project · 2026-10-16
- Reflection's 501B MoE Beam hits 463 tok/s on 8x GB200 with NVFP4 at day 0 — zhyncs42 · 2026-10-16
- Gemma 4 31B QAT on one 24GB card: 46 tok/s plain, ~80 with draft model on RTX 4090 — Subject_Poet_3861 · 2026-10-16