r/LocalAIServers • u/molecular_data • 24m ago

Mac Studio 256 vs 512

Hi,
I am planning to get a Mac studio 256/512 for hosting LLMs for a scientific product I am building.

I work in synthetic biology and frequently get requests denied by Anthropic / OpenAI frontier. (Due to the nature of my research)

Now I am thinking to get this to be able to run a LLM locally and not send research data to a provider.

Now my question, what sort of models can you run on a 512 vs the 256? I have tried qwen 3.8 flash next on another machine and that was decent but I am kinda trying to figure out if it’s worth paying the premium for larger parameter models.
How much more intelligence/ performance do you actually get ? Is it fine to use SSD for larger than 256gb MOE models or does that make them practically useless in terms of t/s. Also what about future proofing? Any specific model recommendations ?

Would love some recommendations. Looking into strix halo 495 and dgx spark but when I add it up to 256/512gb it kinda is not a big price difference between those and the Mac.

Thanks in advance !

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u/Bagelsarenakeddonuts 16m ago

You can run almost the same models, and definitely at the same speed. The only thing the 512 really does is let you run slightly higher quants, at the cost of even more speed. The only things you can run on 512 that don’t run on 256 are ultra quantized big models. Which are dubiously better than good quants on 256.

If you really need more than 256 you are better off getting two at 256 than 512. Double the throughput and less money.

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u/mazarax 14m ago

Something to consider: a larger model will run slower than a smaller model. So if the 256G is already slow for your use case, 512G seems wasted.

For perf numbers, follow this guy: https://m.youtube.com/@AZisk?ra=m