M5 Max 64GB vs NVIDIA RTX 3090 for local LLMs
6 reports on the M5 Max 64GB and 219 on the NVIDIA RTX 3090
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 1.5x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 3090 (614 GB/s on the M5 Max 64GB, 936 on the NVIDIA RTX 3090). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M5 Max 64GB
- Memory
- 64GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 614 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 6
NVIDIA RTX 3090
- Memory
- 24GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 936 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 142 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 219
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 64GB | NVIDIA RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 18.1 t/sQ8_0 | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 82.3 t/sQ2_K | 19.4 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 56.9 t/sQ8_0 | 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 | 18.1 t/sQ8_0 | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 48.8 t/sQ8_0 | 76.4 t/sQ5_K_S |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M5 Max 64GB · NVIDIA RTX 3090
Every report on each card, with its source: M5 Max 64GB · NVIDIA RTX 3090