Mac Studio, M5 Max, 36GB vs Mac Studio, M5 Max, 64GB
Both hold Gemma-3-27B at Q8_0, and Mac Studio, M5 Max, 64GB is not meaningfully faster — an est. 13.9 tok/s against 13.9. Buy Mac Studio, M5 Max, 36GB and keep the $1,000.
- Fit
- Tight
- Fits
- Headroom
- 1GB
- 27GB
- Est. speed
- 13.9 tok/s
- 13.9 tok/s
- Cheapest today
- $2,499 at Apple
- $3,499 at Apple
- Per GB of memory
- $69
- $55
- Memory
- 36GB unified memory
- 64GB unified memory
- Usable for a model
- 33GB
- 59GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 614GB/s
- 614GB/s
- Storage
- 512GB
- 512GB
- Lowest recorded
- $2,499 in 2d
- $3,499 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
- Qwen3-32BWon't fitFits
- Gemma-3-27BTightFits
- gpt-oss-20bFitsFits
- Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128EWon't fitWon't fit
- Llama-4-BehemothWon't fitWon't fit
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.