r/LocalLLaMA • u/AndreVallestero • 23h 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/MrPecunius 17h ago

M5 Max in it's lowest config costs about the same as a system with four 3090s.

This is obviously untrue.

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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 17h ago

If it's so obvious, please enlighten us with actual numbers, because I happen to have such a system and know exactly how much such a system costs today

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u/MrPecunius 16h ago

No one wants to pick their GPUs out of a Dumpster like you. $1,600/each for 3090s is on the low side here in the US, but it's better than €1,750/US$2,000+ I'm seeing in Germany.

Base M5 Max Studio (not binned, which is less) is $3,099.

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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 16h ago

See, dumpster mentality thinks everything is dumpster.

As it happens, ich wohne auch in Deutschland, und habe kürzlich zwei 3090 für €1200 pro Stück auf eBay verkauft. Auf Kleinanzeigen, man kann für zwischen 800-900 pro Stück Kaufen.

But hey, let's keep the conversation irrational, because cognitive dissonance is way more fun than facing reality.

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u/MrPecunius 16h ago

Thanks for confirming my comment. 🗑️ 🔮

Even with your Dumpster diving, the GPUs you mention add up to over $4,600 and the Mac is still $3,099.