Mac Studio vs NVIDIA GPUs for local AI: which is better?
Mac Studio wins on memory per dollar, power and simplicity: about $37 per GB of model memory versus roughly $54 for a DGX Spark and $310 or more for an H100. NVIDIA wins on raw compute, which speeds up long prompts and serving many users at once. Many teams want the memory more than the compute.
In Exo Labs’ tests, a DGX Spark processed a long prompt 3.8 times faster than an M3 Ultra Mac Studio, while the Mac generated tokens 3.4 times faster. Combining both was 2.8 times faster than the Mac alone.
Consumer cards such as the RTX 5090 have very high bandwidth but only 32 GB each, so large models need many cards and a large, power-hungry server.
| Hardware | Fast memory | Bandwidth | Price | Per GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac Studio, M5 Ultra | 256 GB | 1.2 TB/s | $9,499 | ≈ $37 |
| Mac Studio, M5 Max | 128 GB | 614 GB/s | $5,399 | ≈ $42 |
| Mac mini, M5 Pro | 64 GB | 307 GB/s | $3,199 | ≈ $50 |
| NVIDIA DGX Spark | 128 GB | 273 GB/s | $6,950 | ≈ $54 |
| NVIDIA RTX 5090 | 32 GB | 1.79 TB/s | $1,999 list; often $4,300+ | $62–150 |
| NVIDIA H100 SXM | 80 GB | 3.35 TB/s | ≈ $25,000–40,000 | ≈ $310–500 |
Sources
- Apple Store: Mac Studio prices (checked Oct 26, 2026)
- Apple: Mac Studio tech specs
- NVIDIA: DGX Spark
- The Register: DGX Spark price rise (Oct 2, 2026)
- NVIDIA: GeForce RTX 50 Series announcement
- NVIDIA: H100 Tensor Core GPU
- Exo Labs: NVIDIA DGX Spark + Apple Mac Studio with EXO 1.0
- Epoch AI: what a B200 costs
Updated