Mac Studio, M5 Max, 128GB vs Mac Studio, M3 Ultra, 256GB, refurbished
Neither box holds DeepSeek-V3 at Q6_K, at any quant we compute. This pair is the wrong pair for this model.
- Fit
- Won't fit
- Won't fit
- Headroom
- −432GB
- −304GB
- Est. speed
- —
- —
- Cheapest today
- $5,099 at Apple
- $7,729 at Apple Certified Refurbished
- Per GB of memory
- $40
- $30
- Memory
- 128GB unified memory
- 256GB unified memory
- Usable for a model
- 120GB
- 248GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 614GB/s
- 819GB/s
- Storage
- 512GB
- 1TB
- Lowest recorded
- $5,099 in 3d
- $7,729 in 2d
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 fitFits
- DeepSeek-V3Won't fitWon't fit
- Llama-3.3-70BFitsFits
- gpt-oss-120bFitsFits
- Mistral-Large-2411FitsFits
- 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 fitFits
- Qwen3-30B-A3BFitsFits
- Qwen3-4BFitsFits
- Devstral-Small-2507FitsFits
- Phi-4FitsFits
- Gemma-3n-E4BFitsFits
- Qwen3-VL-8B-InstructFitsFits
Every model we track at Q6_K. The rows where the two boxes agree are dimmed, because they are not what you are choosing between.