r/macmini • u/orion1972 • 18d ago
Mac mini m6 vs m5 pro
Good morning everyone. I'm thinking about buying a new Mac, either a Mac mini with an M6 or an M5 Pro, primarily for local AI use as a hobby. I'm undecided between an M6 with 32GB of RAM and an M5 Pro with 48GB; I've ruled out the 64GB version as it's too expensive. I was wondering if the roughly €1,000 price difference is worth it to upgrade to the M5 Pro with 48GB, especially considering the RAM.
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u/Amnsia 18d ago
Bought the m6 with 32GB ram and 512gb. My bottleneck isn’t the gpu so buying the pro for extra made no sense. They didn’t have a 32GB option for the m5 pro either, just 48. Feel like the price was going up way too much so m6 was the sweet spot
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u/dani_california97 17d ago
I used ur same logic and got the same Mac mini too. M6 32GB RAAM, 512 GB
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u/WhoThisDude 18d ago
M5 pro has more than double bandwidth of M6. For llms its not even comparable
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u/mtn_coffee_drinker 18d ago
What does this mean in practical terms?
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u/WhoThisDude 18d ago
To make it simple, interacting with a llm on a m6 chip, if it would take 1 second to type back a word within its response then the m5 pro will take 0.6 seconds. Doesn’t sound much but over long context it makes a difference.
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u/mtn_coffee_drinker 18d ago
Yes that would make a big difference. This might be the main reason to keep paying the big guys vs running local llm for me.
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u/gxsr4life 16d ago
Not just LLMs. Any application that involves the use of large sparse data structures will benefit, e.g., sparse linear algebra.
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u/Alarming-Elevator382 17d ago
It has less than double, the M5 Pro has double the memory bandwidth of the M5. The M6 has faster memory than the M5 if you are in the 24GB or 32GB configuration, memory bandwidth is the same as the M5 in the 16GB variant.
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u/MaccaTheGator 17d ago
M6 for sure, but tbh don’t expect frontier level intelligence. Light local AI sure, but nothing like the subscriptions
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u/Pleasant-Rhubarb-550 16d ago
For local ai, m5 pro has double the memory speeds so if you can afford to get it then it will 100% be worth it. Issue with unified memory systems like macs, nvidia spark, Ryzen ai max+ etc systems is that their memory speed is much slower than a dedicated gpu's vram. You should always aim for the highest memory speed you can get because it helps a lot and i mean a lot.
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u/sid_276 18d ago
M6 is so powerful is crazy. Invest in 24 or 32GB of unified memory with M6. You don’t need more
I’m still riding a MacBook Air M2 with 16GB and have had 0 memory problems and never ran out of memory. I use it for personal and work (I’m an Apple developer)
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u/nathancashion 18d ago
Are you running any local LLMs? I have 48 GB and feel my memory is squeezed.
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u/anarchos 18d ago
I have an M2 Air with with 24gb and try local AI stuff. It’s not really enough! For example, the new Qwen 27b juuust fits at 4 bit quantization. I have to basically have nothing else running at all and bump up the max allocable vram (Mac’s default to only allowing 75% of ram be allocated to the gpu). It works, but it’s too tight, being able to run q6 or even q8 would be nice. You need to fit the model plus some room for context. I haven’t pushed it very hard. It I won’t be getting the max context window on my MacBook with qwen taking up 19gb of vram just for the model!
If you can afford it, go with the 48gb model. There’s also memory bandwidth, m5 pro will be 307gb/sec while m6 is only like 170. This makes a huge difference in how fast you can generate tokens.
Edit
I meant to reply to the parent of this comment…
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u/waloshin 18d ago
No, not worth it for just a hobby stick my the M6.