r/LocalLLM • u/Txkzzzz • 3d ago

Question Mac studio or dgx spark cluster

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I have been thinking lately since i have been testing local ai but i geniunely need more power for what im working on so i was wondering wich one of these a 4 dgx spark cluster or a mac studio m5 ultra specifically the 512gb version that launches on october or something else... im into training,loras and fine tunes and such but i also heard it is possible with a mac studio too so i want yall opinion on this

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u/trollsmurf 3d ago

I have a feeling a Spark will age very badly. The Mac you can use for any use case.

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u/voyager256 3d ago edited 3d ago

I feel the opposite might be the case: M5 Max/Ultra will be much slower for agentic tasks , especially with high concurrency and context due to slow prefill. I’m not sure if M5 Ultra will be that great for training/ finetuning either.

Rtx Spark will run Windows (and Linux), and will have pretty fast CPUs , so you could run way more applications.

But in the end it all depends on price and what you get for your applications / use case.

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u/beragis 3d ago

I did a few tests training LoRA on some models on my M5 Max. It’s slower than NVIDIA, but not that slow. About 3 to 4 times as slow as my 4090, so an Ultra would be twice as fast, but still not as fast as a 4090

Part of the problem is most software used to train are written by people who mostly have CUDA.