M4 Pro 48GB vs M5 Max 36GB for local LLMs
17 reports on the M4 Pro 48GB and 14 on the M5 Max 36GB
Which is faster for local LLMs?
Nobody has reported the same model at the same quant on both cards yet, so there's no measured head-to-head. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 1.7x higher on the M5 Max 36GB (273 GB/s on the M4 Pro 48GB, 461 on the M5 Max 36GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M4 Pro 48GB
- Memory
- 48GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 273 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 9.2 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 17
M5 Max 36GB
- Memory
- 36GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 461 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 14
Estimated by the calculator
The quant the calculator recommends for each card and its estimated speed at a 32,768-token context with 32 GB of system RAM, from memory bandwidth and the model's shape.
| Model | M4 Pro 48GB | M5 Max 36GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 9.4 t/sQ6_K | 19.7 t/sQ5_K_M |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 37.5 t/sQ5_K_M | 75.9 t/sQ4_K_M |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 9.4 t/sQ6_K | 19.7 t/sQ5_K_M |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 18.3 t/sQ8_0 | 50.2 t/sQ5_K_M |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M4 Pro 48GB · M5 Max 36GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M4 Pro 48GB · M5 Max 36GB