Mac Studio, M5 Max, 36GB vs Mac Studio, M5 Max, 48GB
Both hold Qwen3-32B at Q5_K_M, and Mac Studio, M5 Max, 48GB is not meaningfully faster — an est. 17.6 tok/s against 17.6. Buy Mac Studio, M5 Max, 36GB and keep the $600.
- Fit
- Fits
- Fits
- Headroom
- 7GB
- 18GB
- Est. speed
- 17.6 tok/s
- 17.6 tok/s
- Cheapest today
- $2,499 at Apple
- $3,099 at Apple
- Per GB of memory
- $69
- $65
- Memory
- 36GB unified memory
- 48GB unified memory
- Usable for a model
- 33GB
- 44GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 614GB/s
- 614GB/s
- Storage
- 512GB
- 512GB
- Lowest recorded
- $2,499 in 2d
- $3,099 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 fitWon't fit
- DeepSeek-V3Won't fitWon't fit
- Llama-3.3-70BWon't fitWon't fit
- gpt-oss-120bWon't fitWon't fit
- Mistral-Large-2411Won't fitWon't fit
- Llama-4-Scout-17B-16EWon't fitWon't fit
- Qwen3-32BFitsFits
- Gemma-3-27BFitsFits
- gpt-oss-20bFitsFits
- Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128EWon't fitWon't fit
- Llama-4-BehemothWon't fitWon't fit
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.