alt Hacker NewsIn the last year, I have bought an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512 GB, a Macbook Pro M5 MAX with 128 GB and an RTX 6000 Pro. I have spent around $25k so far, not including electricity. I figured worst case scenario I can sell them in the next year and only take a haircut as opposed to losing my entire investment.
In comparison to just spending for tokens, the tokens would have been much cheaper and much much faster. I've been running against Gemma4:31b, Qwen3.5 and 3.6, and getting local LLMs to solve AMC 8/10 math questions and it's about 10-100x slower than just doing it online. When I tried it with ChatGPT late last year, it took about one night and $25 to solve about 1000 questions. Using my RTX 6000 and M3 Ultra and Gemma4:31b on both, it answered about 40 questions in 7 hours and I haven't checked how good the answer is yet. At 800 watts (600 for RTX and 200 for M3 Ultra) and running for 7 hours, it solved around 40 questions.
At the very least I'm going to try to sell my M3 Ultra if I can find a reliable place to sell it without getting ripped off by scammers.
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Running LLMs on Macs is still terribly slow. They simply lack the optimizations other platforms have.
An RTX 6000 pro Blackwell is a pretty good card
Well if it makes you feel better those frontier LLMs are all technically taking a big loss, and they may all be in your shoes after a few years.
Which of these has been the most productive for you? Sounds like you've enjoyed the RTX6000 the most?
All of these have appreciated in value. How much are you looking for the Ultra?
If you are in the bay area, i'm happy to buy that M3 Ultra from you, i've been unsuccessfully looking for one and can't find any.
You'll probably make a profit by selling them today. I bought a M1 Max Studio with 64 GB last year off FB Marketplace for $1000 and today I'm seeing numerous 32 GB M1 Maxes for $1200-1500.
How do you use the RTX 6000 with the Macs? Exo? I would think that would be pretty snappy if configured properly.
I looked into the M3 Ultra 512GB Mac Studio before it was discontinued and the as best as I could determine it just wasn't worth it... yet. The GFLOPS and memory bandwidth just arne't there even though it can hold a much larger model in memory.
But the trend here is interesting. I think by 2030 you'll be able to buy fairly cheap hardware that is currently $10k+. I don't know what this does to the trillions invested in AI data centers because the next NVidia architecture after Blackwell will essentially half the value of purchased cards overnight.
I'm not convinced Apple has yet pivoted the Mac Studio line towards this market and the expected M5 Ultras in Q3 2026 will likely be an incremental improvement rather than big leap forward but I'd like to be proven wrong.
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I’m not usually one to ask this because learning to do a thing can be fun, but why exactly have you spent 25 thousand dollars on getting an LLM someone else made to answer maths exam questions?