Mac Studio, M5 Max, 128GB vs Mac Studio, M3 Ultra, 256GB, refurbished
Both hold Qwen3-235B-A22B at Q3_K_M. Mac Studio, M3 Ultra, 256GB, refurbished decodes an est. 38.1 tok/s against 28.6, and costs $2,630 more — $275.89 per extra token per second. Worth it if you read the output as it arrives; not if you queue jobs.
- Fit
- Tight
- Fits
- Headroom
- 2GB
- 130GB
- Est. speed
- 28.6 tok/s
- 38.1 tok/s
- 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-A22BTightFits
- 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 fitFits
- Llama-4-BehemothWon't fitWon't fit
- Qwen3-Coder-480B-A35B-InstructWon't fitTight
- Kimi-K2-InstructWon't fitWon't fit
- GLM-4.6Won't fitFits
- DeepSeek-R1Won't fitWon't fit
- MiniMax-M2TightFits
- Qwen3-30B-A3BFitsFits
- Qwen3-4BFitsFits
- Devstral-Small-2507FitsFits
- Phi-4FitsFits
- Gemma-3n-E4BFitsFits
- Qwen3-VL-8B-InstructFitsFits
Every model we track at Q3_K_M. The rows where the two boxes agree are dimmed, because they are not what you are choosing between.