Mac Studio, M3 Ultra, 96GB, refurbished vs Mac Studio, M5 Max, 128GB
Both hold Gemma-3-27B at Q5_K_M, and Mac Studio, M5 Max, 128GB is not meaningfully faster — an est. 20.9 tok/s against 27.8. Buy Mac Studio, M3 Ultra, 96GB, refurbished and keep the $770.
- Fit
- Fits
- Fits
- Headroom
- 66GB
- 98GB
- Est. speed
- 27.8 tok/s
- 20.9 tok/s
- Cheapest today
- $4,329 at Apple Certified Refurbished
- $5,099 at Apple
- Per GB of memory
- $45
- $40
- Memory
- 96GB unified memory
- 128GB unified memory
- Usable for a model
- 88GB
- 120GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 819GB/s
- 614GB/s
- Storage
- 1TB
- 512GB
- Lowest recorded
- $4,329 in 3d
- $5,099 in 3d
Fit, headroom and speed are computed from each vendor’s published bandwidth and the model’s own size at 8K context. Prices are the cheapest listing we could read on each seller’s page. The arithmetic is here.
Where they actually differ
- Qwen3-235B-A22BWon't fitWon't fit
- DeepSeek-V3Won't fitWon't fit
- Llama-3.3-70BFitsFits
- gpt-oss-120bTightFits
- Mistral-Large-2411Won't fitFits
- Llama-4-Scout-17B-16EFitsFits
- Qwen3-32BFitsFits
- Gemma-3-27BFitsFits
- gpt-oss-20bFitsFits
- Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128EWon't fitWon't fit
- Llama-4-BehemothWon't fitWon't fit
- Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-InstructWon't fitWon't fit
- Kimi-K2-InstructWon't fitWon't fit
- GLM-4.6Won't fitWon't fit
- DeepSeek-R1Won't fitWon't fit
- MiniMax-M2Won't fitWon't fit
- Qwen3-30B-A3BFitsFits
- Qwen3-4BFitsFits
- Devstral-Small-2507FitsFits
- Phi-4FitsFits
- Gemma-3n-E4BFitsFits
- Qwen3-VL-8B-InstructFitsFits
Every model we track at Q5_K_M. The rows where the two boxes agree are dimmed, because they are not what you are choosing between.