Strix Halo vs Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB for Local LLMs: Which Unified Memory Box?

Short answer

Choose the Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB if your priority is:

• the fastest decode in this class (546 GB/s)
• MLX and llama.cpp support that works on day one
• a fixed, known price: $3,699
• quiet, small, low-maintenance operation

Choose a Strix Halo box if your priority is:

• the lowest entry price for 128GB (about $2,600 as of August 2026)
• Windows or Linux, x86 software, games, and general PC use
• Vulkan runtimes and a tinkering-friendly platform
• avoiding the Apple ecosystem

Specs that matter

Apple lists 546 GB/s for the 40-core-GPU M4 Max. AMD’s quad-channel LPDDR5x-8000 delivers 256 GB/s, and up to 96GB is assignable to the GPU. That 2.1x bandwidth gap is the core technical difference.

The measured result: M4 Max wins decode

Tom’s Hardware tested exactly this $3,699 M4 Max configuration against NVIDIA’s GB10 and Strix Halo. The headline: the M4 Max beats both on decode throughput. Decode is bandwidth-bound, so 546 GB/s versus 256 GB/s shows up directly in tokens per second.

The same article’s honest counterpoint: memory bandwidth is not everything. The GB10 wins prefill despite having half the Mac’s bandwidth, because prefill is compute-bound. If your workload is long project prompts with short answers, raw decode is not the whole story. For chat and long generations, it mostly is.

Both machines do their best work on MoE models. Dense 70B quants are more usable on the Mac’s bandwidth, but a Qwen3-30B-A3B-class MoE runs comfortably on either. See our 128GB model guide and the 64GB guide if you are also weighing smaller configs.

The price math moved

Strix Halo boxes floored near $2,000 before the memory shortage. A July 31, 2026 sweep of 21 Amazon 128GB listings found the cheapest around $2,600, with the range running past $5,000; mid-range units like the GMKtec EVO-X3 sit at $3,500 and up.

That changes the comparison. The old story was “Strix Halo for $1,700 less.” As of August 2026:

• Cheapest Strix Halo (~$2,600) vs Mac ($3,699): you save about $1,100 and give up half the bandwidth.
• Mid-range Strix Halo ($3,500+) vs Mac ($3,699): the Mac is the same money with 2.1x the bandwidth.

Unified-memory boxes took the shortage hardest because memory is most of their bill of materials. Check the live price of the specific box before you commit. A useful anchor: the base M4 Max Mac Studio with 36GB is $2,499, so Apple’s 128GB premium is $1,200 of configuration.

Software: MLX just works, ROCm mostly works

On the Mac, llama.cpp, LM Studio, Ollama, and MLX all run well on day one. On Strix Halo, Vulkan runtimes are solid, and ROCm is workable with caveats: in the Register’s testing most PyTorch scripts ran unmodified, but vLLM and FlashAttention-2 needed manual compilation. Budget setup time on AMD if you go beyond LM Studio.

Decision table

Final recommendation

If price parity is close, buy the Mac Studio M4 Max. Double the bandwidth at the same money is not a close call for decode-heavy local LLM work.

Buy Strix Halo when you find a box near the $2,600 floor and you want an x86 machine anyway. And verify the listing price the day you buy. As of August 2026, shortage pricing moves these boxes weekly.

Next steps

• Run the Local LLM Fit and Speed Estimator
• Best local LLMs for 128GB RAM
• DGX Spark vs Mac Studio M3 Ultra

Sources

• https://www.tomshardware.com/
• https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/specs/
• https://compute-market.com/
• https://www.theregister.com/