M5 Max 128GB vs NVIDIA RTX 5080 for local LLMs
49 reports on the M5 Max 128GB and 31 on the NVIDIA RTX 5080
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 1.6x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 5080 (614 GB/s on the M5 Max 128GB, 960 on the NVIDIA RTX 5080). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M5 Max 128GB
- Memory
- 128GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 614 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 49
NVIDIA RTX 5080
- Memory
- 16GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 960 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 225 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 31
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 | M5 Max 128GB | NVIDIA RTX 5080 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 9.0 t/sFP16 | 62.6 t/sQ2_K |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 41.2 t/sQ5_K_S | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 28.5 t/sFP16 | 207.0 t/sQ2_K |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | 64.8 t/sQ2_K | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 9.0 t/sFP16 | 62.6 t/sQ2_K |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 24.4 t/sFP16 | 139.6 t/sQ3_K_S |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M5 Max 128GB · NVIDIA RTX 5080
Every report on each card, with its source: M5 Max 128GB · NVIDIA RTX 5080