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. gpugreg · 1790003246 · focus · HN ↗
  Those RTX 5090 numbers are bad. You can get over 200 tps with ninfer using NVFP4 and MTP.
  1. beastman82 · 1790006689 · focus · HN ↗
    can confirm.
    I dont' know why people spend huge money on these and Spark. The 5090 is running qwen 3.8 at 200+ tps!! That's 1-2 orders of magnitude faster.
    nacs · 1790006951 · focus · HN ↗
    People don't buy Sparks and M5 Ultras to run a 27B model - you buy it to run an MoE model like Qwen Next which this M5 excelled at.
    ProllyInfamous · 1790013360 · focus · HN ↗
    Exactly; when I first got my RTX 5070 Ti (16gb, to game with!!!, upgrading from VEGA56), I loaded then-latest Qwen3.6 (~30B, cannot remember exactly). My only prior LLM experience was with models <8gb, primarily llama3.1.
    My technical-expert twin played around with these LLMs, for about an hour, and then correctly reasoned "it's able to be WRONG, faster."
    This seems apt. My next LLM machine will be closer to 96gb+ vRAM.
    selectodude · 1790015740 · focus · HN ↗
    Once I get some kind of settlement after getting beaten up by a cop my first purchase will be some RTX Pro 6000s.
    khriss · 1790059538 · focus · HN ↗
    Dude, I'm saying this with the best of intent. Get help.
    ProllyInfamous · 1790220044 · focus · HN ↗
    Don't buzzkill his dreams of financing a GPU.
    ...actually: get help.

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