M5 Max 128GB vs AMD Radeon 780M for local LLMs
26 reports on the M5 Max 128GB and 5 on the AMD Radeon 780M
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active at 8-bit, the M5 Max 128GB runs at 79.4 tokens per second (one run) and the AMD Radeon 780M at 19.7 (2 runs). 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 5.1x higher on the M5 Max 128GB (614 GB/s on the M5 Max 128GB, 120 on the AMD Radeon 780M).
- Memory
- 128GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 614 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 26
- Memory
- shared memory unified
- Memory bandwidth
- not on record
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 5
Measured on both
Median tokens per second 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 quant level. Engines and context lengths can still differ between the runs. How to read these
| Model | M5 Max 128GB | AMD Radeon 780M |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active8-bit | 79.4one run | 19.72 runs |
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 Max 128GB | AMD Radeon 780M |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 28.5 t/sFP16 | not in the calculator yet |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 9.0 t/sFP16 | not in the calculator yet |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 41.2 t/sQ5_K_S | not in the calculator yet |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | 64.8 t/sQ2_K | not in the calculator yet |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 9.0 t/sFP16 | not in the calculator yet |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 24.4 t/sFP16 | not in the calculator yet |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 552B · 16B active | doesn't fit at these settings | not in the calculator yet |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M5 Max 128GB · AMD Radeon 780M
Every report on each card, with its source: M5 Max 128GB · AMD Radeon 780M