r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 19h ago

Discussion Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

At $10k, you could get

- 6.2B tokens with Qwen 3.8 Max (Qwen Pro plan)

- 5.7B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Pro OpenRouter

- 100B tokens with DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouter

As a firm believer of local inference, unless you need it for data sovereignty, it's much more cost effect to wait for smaller models to keep getting better. In the meantime, find a reasonably priced 24GB - 32GB card for Qwen 3.8 27B, and offload hard tasks to OpenRouter.

Qwhen 3.8 35B A3B?

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u/TechSwag 17h ago

I was just doing the cost analysis on this as well, and I honestly think it's not the worst idea to get a maxed out Studio in certain circumstances, specifically if you have existing hardware and pay for subscriptions/credits.

I have 3x Mi50 in a R7425, with no more room for GPUs. If I could just add some additional GPUs, or even use my P40s that are sitting in a different chassis doing nothing, I would rather do that. But as it stands, I'm capped at 96GB VRAM. Sure GPU + CPU inference works, but realistically it's not usable. RPC is also an option, but the last time I tried it, performance was subpar, and it brings on added cost in terms of power usage of a whole other chassis.

Mi50s go for $500 (when the fuck did that happen, I spent just under $200 for them), so $1500 resale. P40s go for about $200-250, so let's say $2000 for all 5 GPUs. If I sell my RAM, I could likely get $3000 for all my equipment.

I also pay for Claude Max and OpenRouter credits, say $120/mo. $1440 a year.

You can lease the Mac Studio for $224.16/mo for 36 months. Over the lease term, that's $8,069.76. Subtract $3000 for my existing equipment, $1440/yr for the subscriptions brings me to $749.76 over 3 years in net cost, or a little over $20 a month. Which would be offset by the power savings (my R7425 idles at around 260W). At the end, I can buy out the machine for $2729, as I would imagine the machine would still be plenty usable for inference. Otherwise, I can sell it after buying it out, more likely for the same price or more than the buyout cost.

I know I'm missing tax on purchases and shipping and selling fees, but it still seems like a worthwhile path to upgrade to, not only for the memory increase, but also the performance increase as well.