Local AI Deals

Mac Studio, M3 Ultra, 96GB, refurbished vs Mac Studio, M5 Ultra, 96GB

Both hold Llama-3.3-70B at Q8_0. Mac Studio, M5 Ultra, 96GB decodes an est. 10.5 tok/s against 7.2, and costs $1,170 more — $351.38 per extra token per second. Worth it if you read the output as it arrives; not if you queue jobs.

Fit
Fits
Fits
Headroom
10GB
10GB
Est. speed
7.2 tok/s
10.5 tok/s
Cheapest today
$4,329 at Apple Certified Refurbished
$5,499 at Best Buy
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

Every model we track at Q8_0. The rows where the two boxes agree are dimmed, because they are not what you are choosing between.