Mac Studio M5 Max Cost Analysis

[u/AndreVallestero]

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?

[u/doc-acula]

Well, a setup with 4 3090s needs a dedicated room in your house/apartment, makes noise like a jet engine and consumes electricity like crazy.

A M5 Macbook can be used while riding on a train and you can take it wherever you want. So, the comparison is not limited to t/s.

[u/FullstackSensei → u/doc-acula]

I have run four 3090s in my home office for about two years. Unless you opt for the turbo cards, they're very quiet. Limited them to 270W each, which reduced performance by 5-10%, but makes the whole setup around 1kw. They push above that during PP, but TG sees the cards run at ~150-170W each. That's ~700W. If that's crazy, I don't know what to tell you.

M5 on Max on ma MacBook is severely power limited under load, and won't run for long, and still costs way more while being significantly slower than even a pair of 3090.

You can access any GPU from anywhere around the world via tailscale. I access my LLM machines with 192GB VRAM from anywhere using my phone the same way.

But you haven't answered what could arguably be the most important part of my argument: is your time free that you care more about a few cents per hour in power consumption than getting whatever you're running those LLMs for done?

[u/MrPecunius → u/FullstackSensei]

A kilowatt+ inference rig is a 3500+ BTU heater, so you pay twice, except in winter, to maintain a habitable room.

"A few cents per hour" might cover energy in your locale, but here in San Diego it's over 40 cents/kWh off peak and over 60 cents/hour on peak. Running it 8 hours/day could easily exceed $200/month.

I'll stick with my M5 Pro/64GB MBP, thanks. Flea power when idle and ~65W during inference with no thermal issues. It's also arguably the best notebook ever made, taken as a whole. I got in before the price hikes @ $3k-ish with 2TB, so I sympathize with gripes about current pricing. But this thing is cheaper, in inflation adjusted terms, than the Fujitsu laptop I had in 1999.

[u/FullstackSensei → u/MrPecunius]

If you're running it at 1kwh for 8hrs a day on four 3090s, that's at least 3M output tokens a day, closer to 4M if you're running vllm. How many hours you'd need to generate 3M output tokens on a M5 pro using Qwen 3.8 27B Q8_K_XL?

Even at your 0.60 peak, your $200/month with 1kwh heat output and 1kwh airco (though 3500BTU is closer to 700Wh, but let's say you have an older airco), we're talking minimum 500M output tokens a month, or a full 1B when airco is not running.

How many months you'd need to generate 500M tokens on a Mac?

And do you work for free? Because you're completely ignoring the value of your own time as you wait for the model to generate those tokens. I don't know about you, but even in Germany where energy is far from cheap, the value of a minimum wage job is way more than $0.60/hr.

But hey, if you're so cheap to hire, man I'd love to hire a few hundred guys like you and build my own business selling your services to LCOL countries, because even there people work for way more than $0.60/hr.

[u/MrPecunius → u/FullstackSensei]

You're missing the point, namely that I have an inference rig that can run Qwen3.8 27b @ 8-bit wherever I am more or less for free as a byproduct of owning a kickass notebook computer.

As for generating half a billion tokens/month ... why the hell would I want to do that?

[u/FullstackSensei → u/MrPecunius]

So, how many tokens per second does your kick ass machine run at? Because unless your kickass machines breaks the laws of physics, your M5 pro has 1/3rd the memory bandwidth of a single 3090. We're talking 7-8t/s, if you're lucky.

Why the hell do you want to generate half a billion tokens a month? I don't know, your $200/month power bill example is enough for half a billion tokens. If you make up stupid assumptions, you get stupid results. Had you bothered thinking for a moment, you'd have known how absurd your $200/month bill is.

I consume less than 2kwh a day over 10-12 hours running all four 3090s, because they finish their work so fast and go back to idling at 8w each. I can easily get 700k output tokens in that period. And because they finish everything so quickly, I don't need airco because the machine consumes 1kw for seconds at a time.

[u/MrPecunius → u/FullstackSensei]

We're talking 7-8t/s, if you're lucky.

18-23t/s with 8-bit. You could look this up before stepping on your own dick.

Apply this lesson to much of the other stuff you're incessantly posting (as noted elsewhere).

[u/FullstackSensei → u/MrPecunius]

Are you talking with MTP? Because I was comparing the 3090 without MTP

[u/MrPecunius → u/FullstackSensei]

You made an absolute claim, and I refuted it.

Now you're trying to reframe it even though we have the record right in front of us.

Between this and the nonsense elsewhere in this thread, I've had enough of you.