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Apple says the new M5 Ultra Mac Studio is up to 4x faster than the M3 Ultra at LLM prompt processing. I own an M3 Ultra Mac Studio, so I raced them head to head on local AI: same model, same prompt, same settings. On a 32,000-token prompt with Qwen3.8 27B, the M5 Ultra started answering in 21.7 seconds. The M3 Ultra took 82.8. That's 3.8x. Then the M5 wrote the answer 1.5x faster (43.3 vs 28.1 tokens per second), which lines up with its jump in memory bandwidth from 819 GB/s to 1.2 TB/s.



Then I threw my real work at it. Whisper transcribed two hours of my audio in about a minute and a half. A local vision model described my footage, a job I pay the Gemini video API for right now. I generated images with FLUX.2 and video with LTX-2.5, ran my Hermes agent on a local model, tried an open decision model (Laya) in place of Jev, and let a local model edit a video in DaVinci Resolve through its MCP server. All of it runs on the Mac. No internet required.



In this video you'll learn how the M5 Ultra and M3 Ultra compare for running LLMs locally with MLX, why the wait for the first word (time to first token) got about 4x shorter while writing speed only got 1.5x faster, how model size and dense vs mixture-of-experts models change the numbers, and whether a Mac Studio makes sense as your own local AI server.



Apple loaned me the M5 Ultra Mac Studio for this video, and it goes back to them. They don't control what I say, and all the tests and all the numbers are mine.



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RESOURCES / LINKS:

📊 Every result, the raw data and my benchmark tool: https://github.com/theNetworkChuck/mac-studio-m5-ultra-local-ai

🌐 The results as a web page: https://thenetworkchuck.github.io/mac-studio-m5-ultra-local-ai/

🍎 Shop Apple at Micro Center: https://micro.center/65c6f2

📰 Micro Center News: https://micro.center/5059e1

🛠️ MLX (Apple's machine learning framework): https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx

🛠️ mlx-lm (runs the chat models): https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx-lm

🤖 Qwen3.8 27B, 4-bit MLX (the race model): https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3.8-27B-4bit

🎙️ Whisper on MLX: https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx-examples/tree/main/whisper

🖼️ mflux (FLUX.2 on MLX): https://github.com/filipstrand/mflux

🖼️ FLUX.2 klein 4B: https://huggingface.co/black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-klein-4B

🎬 LTX-2.5 video model: https://huggingface.co/Lightricks/LTX-2.5

🧠 Laya decision model: https://huggingface.co/convaiinnovations/laya

🤖 Hermes Agent: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

📺 Set up your own Hermes agent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQEgIo4Juxg

🤖 LM Studio (and Bionic): https://lmstudio.ai

🎬 DaVinci Resolve: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve



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#macstudio #localai #m5ultra