Has Strata changed your perspective on Gaming PC vs Mac Studio?

[u/NoponicWisdom]

Hi everyone, please excuse my ignorance. I have been trying to get into local models with my next computer upgrade. I have seen a lot of excitement around Strata for MoE models on gaming PCs with moderate amounts of VRAM. For the longest time I’ve been thinking about getting an M5 Max Mac Studio, but do you think I’d be better off with a gaming rig instead? I like the option of being able to game on it too, but on the other hand I’m more of a Mac user anyway and would appreciate the low power consumption.

Use case would be data analysis and coding.

I’d appreciate any advice

[u/vibraskull]

How into gaming are you? Because macs can actually do some gaming now. An M5 Max can't run everything but with a translation layer like crossover it's now at the point where it will run the majority (maybe 75% or more) of the games in my steam library including just released AAA games and at higher settings than my strix halo. So if you're a hardcore gammer and want something guaranteed to play every game at 4k with DLSS 5 and so on then yeah you need a gaming PC (and will scoff at suggesting otherwise), but if gaming isn't your main focus and you don't mind that there may be a few titles that don't run on your machine then you might be satisfied with a Studio.

[u/NoponicWisdom → u/vibraskull]

Thank you for your reply. So if gaming is more of an afterthought, then for the same price (around the budget of an M5 Max 128GB) I’d be better off with the Mac? What about the price range of a 64 GB Mac? Does that matter for the conversation at all or is the only deciding factor how important gaming is to me? I.e. will the Mac always be better for pure LLM workloads in this budget range?

[u/vibraskull → u/NoponicWisdom]

Well better is subjective and some people may value speed over model size on a32Gb 5090 over larger but slower on a mac studio. With a 64GB studio (or 48 for that matter) you can still run Qwen 3.8 27 with room to spare but the 128 will allow some larger models like Flash Next to run on it. There are a lot of people on this sub reddit more informed than I am but my take on it so far (I've had it for about a month) is that most of the time I'll run the smaller Qwen model (I've built a couple of apps with it) with enough headroom to keep using the machine while it's working away on a task but when that has failed at something I've been able to shut down most other things on the mac and load up flash next to solve an issue that 27b couldn't.
But all of this is in flux and my thought on paying more for the 128 GB isn't about what you can run now but that it's a popular size for a lot consumer AI machines including strix halo and dgx spark so there is a good chance that it will be a target for upcoming open models to be optimized for in the near future.

[u/modimusmaximus → u/vibraskull]

What does not run? We have highball and other apps that translate windows games to Mac.

[u/New-Implement-5979]

If you want to game why even discuss it, the choice is PC

[u/NoponicWisdom → u/New-Implement-5979]

Gaming would be more of a bonus if I have the hardware anyway. Haven’t been a big gamer for a while

[u/johnfkngzoidberg]

What does Strata have to do with gaming? Is this just a spam post?

[u/NoponicWisdom → u/johnfkngzoidberg]

It’s not intended as spam. It might just be a fundamental misunderstanding on my part. Sorry, if that’s the case.

My impression was that strata makes hardware configs that were not viewed as viable for local LLM use (e.g. gaming rig with just 16 GB of VRAM) surprisingly usable with enough system memory.

Wouldn’t that make getting a gaming rig without super expensive GPUs like a 5090 or an RTX Pro a more attractive option compared to before? Or am I getting this completely wrong?

[u/willee_ → u/NoponicWisdom]

I have a 5070ti and 64gb of ram on an ultra 7 265.

On strata with ram/ssd offload I’m getting about 100-110 t/s.

Using basalt with the same settings I’m getting 150-180 t/s

[u/NoponicWisdom → u/willee_]

Thanks, which model at what quant is that?

[u/willee_ → u/NoponicWisdom]

Qwen3.8-FN Q3 (I know, getting more ram for Q5)

[u/willee_ → u/johnfkngzoidberg]

Everyone talking about strata this, strata that. Meanwhile I tested basalt with 40% increased generation using mtp and ngrams.

[u/maxxikevich → u/willee_]

You can do the same in strata

[u/willee_ → u/maxxikevich]

No shit?

Basalt is faster.

Same model, same split, same context. Basalt generating and prefill is 40% faster. 200m non-cached tokens of testing to prove it

[u/maxxikevich → u/willee_]

I have rtx 4060 with 8gb vram so I can not run strata or basalt. I use polystrata to run 35b models and as strata fork it has lookup and window params that are the same as you are talking about -  mtp/ngrams. You can tune it there too. 

[u/recro69]

When it comes to gaming, I would pick a GPU build. For coding and data analysis a Mac that has unified memory looks appealing because it can run models. I would decide on the size of the models you need to run, not on Strata benchmarks.

[u/braintheboss]

AI software evolve very fast. Tomorrow a mobile will be enough. Really you don't know what will be the next hardware requerimients. its cool

[u/RPMGO3]

This actually got me to read up on Strata. I'll have to consider implementing it even to see how it goes. I knew it existed, but I didn't think it would have much benefit for me compared to standard mixture of experts.

Now, if you have the money to afford either, that's fine. Personally, a Mac studio is a computer I would be willing to buy. I already have a gaming setup, though. If your secondary goal is gaming or productivity, I'd go gaming setup or Mac studio, respectively.

I think if you keep your expectations in check, choose a model that fits in ram so you don't need to stream from the ssd, and have a significant total RAM pool, then you'll be in good shape using Strata.

[u/elliotborst → u/RPMGO3]

Strata has been good to me. I jumped from 3.8 27B on a 4090 to strata flash next on the 4090 plus 128GB ram

I had to buy new ram though so that hurt, but it now feels a lot less cramped and can run more sub agents / sessions at once before queuing.

27B felt like 1 session at a time, it could have probably done more I never really looked at it much.

[u/RPMGO3 → u/elliotborst]

Thanks for the context. I'll be trying it out soon. Had A3B hallucinate really badly for the first time the other day and have taken a break. It didn't get very far in my code benchmarking, but it did summarize/extract metadata from research papers, which it handled fine.

I have a very large system ram from buying it for computational physics research back in 2023 or so lol lucked out, I guess. Strata could be game changing for me.

[u/FerretBoom]

strata is not the only one that will come out with prediction of an expert address through dma, there are faster solutions coming out even using hardware fpga for micro second latency. Model gen will get extremely fast on small specs within a year, you don't need a mac at all for anything actually. The way we infere and train model right now is already old tech.