Ask HN: Which laptop can run the largest LLM model?

3 pointsgrokblah7mo ago4 comments

I’d like to experiment with LLMs locally and understand their infrastructure better.

4 comments

incomingpain7mo ago

https://rog.asus.com/us/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/s...

The out of stock one has 128gb of unified system ram. AMD 395 ai chip.

So easily run 70B models on that much vram; but slower, probably in that 30-40tokens/s which is very usable.

Qwen 3 30b will be in that 60 tokens/s range.

llama 4 scout will be around 20-30tokens/s

grokblahOP7mo ago

Interesting, I found it on Amazon for $5k: https://a.co/d/h085rvP

That’s the same price as an M4 Max MBP with the same ram and storage. Any idea how they compare in performance?

PaulHoule7mo ago

Don’t the M-series processors for Mac book pro’s have a huge amount of HBM which is good for models? I see you can get a pro with 48MB of unified memory whereas Alienware will sell you a machine with 32GB of regular ram and 24GB of graphics RAM on a 5090 discrete GPU. So the pro has twice the RAM accessible to the GPU.

grokblahOP7mo ago

Looks like the MacBook Pro might be more cost effective? I like the support for larger models. Thanks!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

4 comments

incomingpain7mo ago

https://rog.asus.com/us/laptops/rog-flow/rog-flow-z13-2025/s...

The out of stock one has 128gb of unified system ram. AMD 395 ai chip.

So easily run 70B models on that much vram; but slower, probably in that 30-40tokens/s which is very usable.

Qwen 3 30b will be in that 60 tokens/s range.

llama 4 scout will be around 20-30tokens/s

grokblahOP7mo ago

Interesting, I found it on Amazon for $5k: https://a.co/d/h085rvP

That’s the same price as an M4 Max MBP with the same ram and storage. Any idea how they compare in performance?

PaulHoule7mo ago

grokblahOP7mo ago

Looks like the MacBook Pro might be more cost effective? I like the support for larger models. Thanks!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse