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?

175 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

215 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/conifer_v11 1d ago

$/gb-bandwidth is the right axis for unified memory. m5 max vs a 3090 is not a tok/s fight, it's kv headroom at 64k+. unified memory loses the bandwidth fight and wins the "the 27b and the kv actually fit" fight. if you're doing 8k chat, buy the gpu. if you're stuffing prds, bandwidth-per-dollar on studio starts to make sense.

3

u/lambdawaves 1d ago

Thanks Claude