M5 Pro 24GB vs M6 16GB for local LLMs
3 reports on the M5 Pro 24GB and 0 on the M6 16GB
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 2.0x higher on the M5 Pro 24GB (307 GB/s on the M5 Pro 24GB, 154 on the M6 16GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M5 Pro 24GB
- Memory
- 24GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 307 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 3
M6 16GB
- Memory
- 16GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 154 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 0
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 Pro 24GB | M6 16GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 31.1 t/sQ2_K | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 102.9 t/sQ2_K | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 31.1 t/sQ2_K | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 69.3 t/sQ3_K_S | doesn't fit at these settings |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M5 Pro 24GB · M6 16GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M5 Pro 24GB · M6 16GB