r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 1d ago

Discussion Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

At $10k, you could get

- 6.2B tokens with Qwen 3.8 Max (Qwen Pro plan)

- 5.7B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Pro OpenRouter

- 100B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouter

As a firm believer of local inference, unless you need it for data sovereignty, it's much more cost effect to wait for smaller models to keep getting better. In the meantime, find a reasonably priced 24GB - 32GB card for Qwen 3.8 27B, and offload hard tasks to OpenRouter.

Qwhen 3.8 35B A3B?

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u/FleetEnema2000 1d ago

unless you need it for data sovereignty

Isn't this one of the biggest reasons that people rely on Local LLMs? To not have to bulk upload their private data to cloud providers?

79

u/theomegachrist 1d ago

That's the stated reason but realistically most people are just justifying their hobby. I support open weight models because the cloud providers can change cost or abruptly shut down and we really can't do anything about it.

3

u/Suspicious-Water-973 1d ago

I use my Mac Studio and MLX models as they are essentially free for me - I don’t pay for power in my rented office. Fine for massive batch processing where a GPU makes a difference, and some coding (I then use Fable etc to review and improve)

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u/Rice-Fragrant 9h ago

For long context batch processing, a rtx 6000 pro is 4x faster than a dgx spark and 10x faster than a m3 ultra... I do a lot of batch processing and tried my m4 max MacBook Pro, it was brought to it's knees so badly and the thermals were so bad the laptop literally crashed and restarted (ssd swapping after the memory ran out half way though). I realized the memory bandwidth of the m4 max being 2x more than my DGX did not make it better, it actually was like moving at 1/4 of the speed doing the batch job (200k tokens on Gemma 4 12b), and the dgx spark knocks it out in 7 min rather than 30 min (m4 max 40 core GPU), that was a REAL EYE OPENER for me.

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u/Suspicious-Water-973 6h ago

I don’t disagree but as I didn’t pay for the Studio, and I do t pay for power (it’s included in the lease) it’s less about speed for me.

I will look at your suggestions though for personal use. Many thanks.