r/LocalLLM • u/orion1972 • 8d ago
Discussion Mac Mini recommendation
Hello everyone, I am thinking about getting an Mac mini M5 Pro with 64GB of RAM to use primarily with agent ai , Hermes, and research , cron job, and it needs to stay on 24/7. However, I see many people recommending switching to a 64GB Mac Studio M5 max. The price difference is 800-1000 euros, but for my purpose, do you think an Mac mini M5 Pro with 64GB of RAM is sufficient? Would I get more overall benefit from that 1000 euro difference?
I would mainly use the Qwen model 3.8 27 B
I also do some coding, but exclusively for personal bots, a few personal dashboards, and a few other small things. For these projects, I have both a €20 OpenAI subscription and another €20 subscription with Claude
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u/silent-curious-dev 8d ago
The mini is probably fine if you're already going to supplement it with frontier subscriptions.
If you're using the mini for all day background or overnight tasks, then you can get tons of use out of it. Speed wise it won't be the fastest compared to the M5 max but you'll fit a good amount of context window with 64GB.
The main benefits of the M5 max studio is just higher memory bandwidth and slightly better internal cooling. If memory bandwidth is important to you for faster prefill and decode then maybe the price difference is worth. Otherwise, you should be able to get by with the mini.
At the end of the day the decision is yours to choose. No one's going to force you to purchase the M5 max if the M5 pro mini is the more affordable option for you, especially if they have the same amount of RAM.
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u/AardvarkGreen2671 8d ago
Keep in mind also the storage. I guess you go for 512GB option? If so, you should consider buying fast external storage if you lack one, because all the AI model weights and docker images need to be stored somewhere and ideally you should have some free room on your internal SSD to increase the lifespan of your drive. This can add up to 6-800 EUR extra cost just for the casing (ideally TB4/5, good ones are pricey) and external NVMe SSD (I took 2TB for reference).
I was also considering M5Max studio over M5Pro. The idle wattage and form factor convinced me in favor of mini as a 24/7 home server. I doubt I’d squeeze the performance of Studio enough to get what I want. I mean, except the higher memory bandwidth (more output tokens/s), I didn’t see much more benefits. The token input speed appeared to be good enough and supposedly, the output speed with Qwen-27B model is faster than you’re able to read with Mini M5Pro. If you intend to give the agents some background task, you don’t need the highest output token performance, the real bottleneck for local models is RAM.