Thread

M5 Ultra Mac Studio Review

269 points · 262 comments · piotrgrabowski

simonw · 1790001122 · focus · HN ↗
The numbers I was most interested in are tucked away in a chart towards the bottom - the speed comparison of the Mac Studios v.s. a RTX 5090:
```
  Qwen3.8 27B tokens&#x2F;sec generation speed

  Prompt size    8K    64K   128K   256K
  RTX 5090 PC    59    51    44     n&#x2F;a
  M5 Ultra       48    39    32     24
  M3 Ultra       31    23.5  20     15
```
A whole bunch more comparison numbers in this section: <a href="https://www.macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-review-the-dream-mac-for-local-ai-agents/#mx-pc" rel="nofollow">https://www.macstories.net/stories/m5-ultra-mac-studio-revie...
1. nacs · 1790006878 · focus · HN ↗
  That's a dense model. Of course it will do worse.
  Now try running that Qwen 3.8 Next model on the 5090 and tell me what TPS you get (hint: it's near 0 since it doesnt fit the 32GB VRAM on 5090 vs the 256 in OPs M5).
  1. peri-cl · 1790007178 · focus · HN ↗
    Surprisingly, the Reddit crowd are reporting 50–60 tokens/s (for the 32 GiB 5090 + 128 GiB RAM)—on par with the M5 Ultra benchmarks, despite both the PCIe bottleneck and much smaller DDR5 bandwidth,
    <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wl06np/qwen38flashnext_on_1x_rtx_5090_tg50_ts_pp2300_ts/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wl06np/qwen38f...
    (Note it's a sparse MoE with only 6B active).
    nacs · 1790007858 · focus · HN ↗
    Good to know thanks.
    That's with CPU offload to a DDR5 6000 RAM though which is around $3-4k at least.
    well_ackshually · 1790015767 · focus · HN ↗
    Unlike a 256GB M5 Ultra that is $10k+.
    cma · 1790038276 · focus · HN ↗
    But the 5090 they use there is now going low stock and selling for over $7500 in some places.

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