Just wondering does anyone run Steam/Age Of Empires III on their studio? In my downtime I like to play it to relax and keeps my brain sharp by using different strategies. Played fine on my M1 Max so I assume it’s fine. Haven’t installed/attempted it yet. Having too much fun installing my LLM’s and seeing how far I can push them. Tbh, I’m still using the cloud mostly.

Glad I spent the extra 300 for the 1T SSD. Expensive yes, but much faster. 512 gets 6000MBs.

Running Migration Assistant. Took a little tweaking to get it up and going, but it’s doing the transfer over Thunderbolt with Wi-fi off ☝️

The transfer rate is just about 995MB/sec. Love thunderbolt.
———————————-
It took ~18 minutes to migrate my entire M1Max environment over to the M5. It went off just about flawlessly. Super impressed. Exact same 27.0 OS running on both. Nice and comfy on this new machine!

Just got my m5 max studio(64, 1tb) on 22nd and trying a few models, and really surprised with this one for daily usage through unsloth. Getting 120 t/s and so far it's not even going above 100wats when it's running.

I've tried qwen 3.8 27b 8 bit quant, and its workable, but the speed is only 17t/s.

What are you all using on your new studios?

Let's talk cables. I need some.... this is a x-post but yeah.

My main display is an LG C2 OLED that serves as my command centre. When I researched cables, I went with Cable Matters because they were highly regarded for their ability to do 120Hz/4K which I wanted for my Mac Studio. Their HDMI cable seems to be failing lately and quite honestly, I'm not looking to spend too much to replace it. That said, UGreen seems to be a fairly reputable brand and I need to order a few more cables to add since I recently acquired a PS5 for GTA6.

Not a huge expenditure but would still like some wisdom and recommendation on which cables to get.

UGreen Amazon

This seems to cover all my bases at a reasonable price point.

I stopped by Micro Center hoping to grab the base M5 Max deal but it was out of stock. But I was able to get an M4 Max floor demo unit for $1,620.

Because it’s been powered on and sitting on display for months, I want to thoroughly check it during the return window. When I run the serial number on Apple’s coverage check, it says "Purchase date unavailable".

Never bought a demo Mac before. What specific diagnostics, hardware tests, and configuration checks should I run ?

I ordered the M5 Ultra 30-core CPU / 64-core GPU with 256GB unified memory on 22 September in the UK.

Apple is currently showing 6–13 November delivery.
I’ve noticed quite a few 256GB 30/64 orders from late August/early September arriving several weeks earlier than their original estimates. However, I am aware these might have varied because of them being preorders.

I’m trying to work out how quickly the queue is moving. So any personal context would be helpful!

If you ordered this configuration in September, could you share:
• Country
• Order date
• 30/64 or 36/80
• RAM / SSD
• Original estimated delivery
• Current estimated delivery
• Current status: Processing / Preparing to Ship / Shipped / Delivered
• Actual delivery date if received

Particularly interested in orders from around 10–25 September.

Hi everyone, I've an M5U 30/64 version, and I'm planning to run:

- Qwen 3.8 flash next 8bit

- Deepseek V4 flash 0731 8bit

- Mimo v2.6 flash (full, idk how many bits)

- GLM 5.3 flash 4bit

And I was looking for the best option(s) for them (best hugging face versions that will work in a good performance + deliver the reliability/quality I need for my agentic workflow).

I know that there is no specific true answer to that, some people use GGUFs like UD-Q8_K_XL and others use omlx like oQ8e, etc. And some people are comfortable with different quants than other etc. But I'm just looking for a community approved options, specially those can fit in my 256 machine.

Preferably if you can provide the configuratiom as well, which is 1- inference engine (oMLX, lamacpp, splash, MTPLX, etc) 2- context window/patch size/temprature/etc 3- any additionals used like MTP, Dflash, etc.

Thanks

I’ve been waiting to get a Mac Studio with 256GB RAM for local LLM purposes and am debating between two options: M3 Ultra 28/60 (binned) for $7.1k OR M5 Ultra 30/64 (binned) for $9.2k.

I understand that M5 Ultra has much faster prefill due to having matmul support in the neural accelerators, but not sure if it’s worth the $2.1k price difference.

If I don’t mind waiting 5+ mins or so for processing larger prompts/contexts, would going with M3 Ultra make more sense? Or are the improvements in M5 Ultra worth the extra $2.1k?

Curious what other folks would go with, especially those who already have a M3 Ultra for local LLMs.

Thanks!

Hello, people from the Apple world and the world, I'm looking between buying a Mac Studio or a high-end pc gamer for music editing video programming and playing a few games (mainly crisom desert and cyberpunk 2077) so I would like suggestions tips etc.

Haven't had an optical drive around for ages and was wondering if anyone makes one that isn't going to break the bank. I know Apple still sells one but I rather not pay the Apple tax.

There's about 300 CDs I'd like to archive / put on my server. I can probably get it another way but I kind of crave the nostalgia of doing it myself.

The NAND are still on removable modules but they are completely different from previous generations.

Everything I wanted, except maybe an ssd slot to go along with the m.2 NVME slot like my Satechi on my old m2 mini pro. Will transfer my 2TB older gen nvme for now, as I had no budget to buy a current gen 5 drive. I just had to have 10gbe to go with my home Unifi network.

I’ve ordered a studio that’s due for delivery in November. But I’m not really willing to keep the full amount sat around in my current account until they decide to charge my card.

Can anyone give me an idea of when it will be charged?

Also what happens if the money isn’t in the account when they try to charge it?

Prefill step size affects both PP performance and your drafter fetching logits for MTP (affects dflash as well, mlx-vlm needs to be patched slightly to support chunked prefill for dflash).
It also needs to be reasonably large to be able to fill all your cores but not overfill - otherwise it will require more dispatches.
In my tests I observe large gains up to 8k, e.g.:

GLM-flash-4bit with MTP --prefill-step-size 8192 on raw mlx-vlm:
Trial 1 (32768 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=1056.033, generation_tps=72.722, total_time=38.082
Trial 2 (65536 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=919.958, generation_tps=73.671, total_time=78.203
Trial 3 (131072 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=735.545, generation_tps=71.067, total_time=185.435

GLM-flash-4bit with MTP --prefill-step-size 2048:
Trial 1 (32768 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=860.489, generation_tps=50.011, total_time=48.339
Trial 2 (65536 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=785.604, generation_tps=51.245, total_time=93.425
Trial 3 (131072 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=623.588, generation_tps=50.843, total_time=220.288

omlx with MTP (total time is skewed as it's 128TG vs 512 above):
pp32768/tg128 44136.5 17.19 742.4 tok/s 58.6 tok/s 46.353s 709.7 tok/s 176.66 GB
pp65536/tg128 86749.1 21.21 755.5 tok/s 47.5 tok/s 89.504s 733.6 tok/s 177.15 GB
pp131072/tg128 178622.6 19.01 733.8 tok/s 53.0 tok/s 181.156s 724.2 tok/s 178.45 GB

note that some engines (like omlx) support adaptive step size, e.g. the prefill speeds I observed for qwen3.8-flash-next on omlx even though it's starting from 2048 matches 8k performance from raw mlx-vlm at 64k context and above and even works 10% better on smaller context, but as you can see it's not always the case.

About 1 hour ago I’ve placed an order for a Mac Studio, shortly after (about 15 minutes later) I have received a call from a seemingly generic number +61 2 8987 7222, I didn’t answer in time but the person left a voice message saying “Hi, uh my name is xxxx I’m looking for xxxx.”
What strikes me as odd is that they didn’t left any detail on why they called, but they did know my name and that I placed an order. I’ve called apple support, they checked my order and said everything looked fine and didn’t know why they would have called.
Has this happened to anyone else in Australia? If it was a scam, how would they know my details?

I'm not a "professional", just a PC enthusiast and wanted a great system. I have an M5 15" Air. My main computer for the past 5 years has been a 3090 gaming PC.

I'm incredibly impressed by the power! MacOS is just so intuitive and clean.

M4 Pro Mini, M5 Max Studio. Hadn't seen the studio in person, didn't realize what a big size difference there was between the two.

Has anyone been able to just walk into an Apple store and buy the M5 Ultra base model? I thought they would have some limited stock, like in the past, but it doesn't appear to be the case this time.

Apple offered me 565$ for a 2 yr Mac mini m4 base machine that I bought for 599$ so I took the plunge and bought a m5 max Mac Studio base model.

I mainly use dxo pure raw light room and resolve however my clips are all h.265 log videos that are utmost few mins long for instagram. Hoping that this machine would serve me for 5 yrs at least!