Mac Studio, M3 Ultra, 96GB, refurbished vs Mac Studio, M5 Ultra, 96GB
Both hold Gemma-3-27B at Q5_K_M. Mac Studio, M5 Ultra, 96GB decodes an est. 40.8 tok/s against 27.8, and costs $1,170 more — $90.41 per extra token per second. Worth it if you read the output as it arrives; not if you queue jobs.
- Fit
- Fits
- Fits
- Headroom
- 66GB
- 66GB
- Est. speed
- 27.8 tok/s
- 40.8 tok/s
- Cheapest today
- $4,329 at Apple Certified Refurbished
- $5,499 at Apple
- Per GB of memory
- $45
- $57
- Memory
- 96GB unified memory
- 96GB unified memory
- Usable for a model
- 88GB
- 88GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 819GB/s
- 1.2TB/s
- Storage
- 1TB
- 1TB
- Lowest recorded
- $4,329 in 2d
- $5,499 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-120bTightTight
- Mistral-Large-2411Won't fitWon't fit
- 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.