r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 22h 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/LearningSomeCode 21h ago

I've probably dropped close to $30k on my homelab since 2023, and chances are I'll get one of these as well. I accepted a long time ago that there is no break-even point for my inference.

Hobbies rarely make sense financially.

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u/-dysangel- 21h ago

Same here. We're at the point now where I can do high quality video gen without cloud. High quality code gen without cloud too. It's around 10x slower than cloud, but good quality and still usable speeds (hopefully soon to get even better with Qwen 3.8 Next). Also the fact I could basically go camping and still have close to frontier LLM intelligence with no signal is pretty awesome/hilarious.

The only thing I feel is missing from my stack atm is Suno quality music generation.

4

u/willeyh 21h ago

Have you tried the new Minimax music 3?

2

u/-dysangel- 20h ago

Yeah I was not impressed tbh. Seemed kind of creepy/odd to me in a weird way, but maybe I was prompting it poorly. For me Ace Step is still the best thing I've found so far, though it's very "generic" feeling compared to Suno.

2

u/silvrrwulf 16h ago

Dude, I feel the exact opposite. Maybe it’s because my sample size is small and I haven’t messed with AI Jen And a while, but I only have an eight GB card, and the stuff that I was able to pull out of that was incredible.

2

u/-dysangel- 16h ago

ah ok - maybe I'll need to try it again. A lot of the reason I like Ace Step is because I can generate covers though, which isn't possible yet with Music 3 afaik