When working with long-context text, hardware choice matters more than the model itself. The unified memory on the M3 Ultra and Mac Pro M5 Max is friendlier to long contexts, while the RTX 4090 and 5090 are stronger on throughput and concurrency. But AI can't give a definitive answer—real-world performance depends on bandwidth, KV cache, and framework optimizations, and cost-effectiveness also has to be weighed. Let's look at the benchmark data and see what we ultimately choose...
Local LLM Hardware Selection in Practice
LightningAbstract
When working with long-context text, hardware choice matters more than the model itself. The unified memory on the M3 Ultra and Mac Pro M5 Max is friendlier to long contexts, while the RTX 4090 and 5090 are stronger on throughput and concurrency. But AI can't give a definitive answer—real-world performance depends on bandwidth, KV cache, and framework optimizations, and cost-effectiveness also has to be weighed. Let's look at the benchmark data and see what we ultimately choose...