M5 16GB vs NVIDIA RTX 3090 for local LLMs
3 reports on the M5 16GB and 217 on the NVIDIA RTX 3090
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Qwen3.8 27B at 3-bit, the M5 16GB has 9.0 generation tokens/s (one run); the NVIDIA RTX 3090 has 42.3 generation tokens/s (one run); prompt processing 1127.0 tokens/s (one run). Those are community reports whose engines and settings differ, so the gap is a rough sign, not a controlled measure of the two cards. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 6.1x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 3090 (154 GB/s on the M5 16GB, 936 on the NVIDIA RTX 3090).
- Memory
- 16GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 154 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 3
- Memory
- 24GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 936 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 142 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 217
Measured on both
Generation and prompt processing speeds from plain runs (one device, one request, no speculative decoding, the whole model in the device's memory) of the same model size at the same bit class. Each side shows the engines and reported context behind its median. Context can mean a configured window or prompt depth, so these are community comparisons with differing settings. How to read these
| Model | M5 16GB | NVIDIA RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B3-bit | 9.0one runllama.cpp8K context | 42.3one runPP 1127.0 (one run)llama.cpp16K context |
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. Where a model was also measured above, the measurement wins.
| Model | M5 16GB | NVIDIA RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 19.4 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 120.1 t/sQ4_K_S |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 76.4 t/sQ5_K_S |
| GLM-5.3 320B · 18B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M5 16GB · NVIDIA RTX 3090
Every report on each card, with its source: M5 16GB · NVIDIA RTX 3090