M5 Ultra 256GB vs NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB for local LLMs
32 reports on the M5 Ultra 256GB and 68 on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB
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 3.4x higher on the M5 Ultra 256GB (1,229 GB/s on the M5 Ultra 256GB, 360 on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M5 Ultra 256GB
- Memory
- 256GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 1,229 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 32
NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB
- Memory
- 12GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 360 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 51 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 68
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 Ultra 256GB | NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 14.9 t/sFP16 | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 50.8 t/sQ8_0 | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 53.5 t/sFP16 | 13.1 t/sQ6_K, experts in RAM |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | 66.9 t/sQ4_K_M | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 14.9 t/sFP16 | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 40.1 t/sFP16 | 58.8 t/sQ2_K |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M5 Ultra 256GB · NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M5 Ultra 256GB · NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB