Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB vs RTX 3060 12GB for Local LLMs

The Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB has about 127% more memory bandwidth (819 vs 360 GB/s). Batch-1 decode tracks bandwidth closely, so a model that fits both cards should decode roughly 127% faster on the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB. The Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB fits more of the catalog at Q4/8K — 47 vs 18 of 61 models (96 vs 12 GB VRAM). Largest model that fits the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB but not the RTX 3060 12GB: DeepSeek-V4-Flash (158.1B). MSRP is $3,999 for the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB vs $329 for the RTX 3060 12GB. MSRP is a launch list price, not live retail — Amazon prices move; click through for the current price. In the Q4/8K head-to-head below (40 shared models), the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB posts the higher tok/s in 36 rows vs 4. Methodology.

Spec comparison

	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB	RTX 3060 12GB
Vendor	Apple	NVIDIA
VRAM	96 GB	12 GB
Memory type	LPDDR5	GDDR6
Memory bandwidth	819 GB/s	360 GB/s
TDP	480 W	170 W
MSRP (list)	$3,999	$329
Buy	Search Amazon (affiliate)	MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12G OC (affiliate) · More listings

MSRP is the launch list price, not live retail. Buy links are Amazon affiliate links — the price after you click is the live price.

Q4 / 8K head-to-head — top 15 of 40 shared models

Model	Params (B)	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB tok/s	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB fits	RTX 3060 12GB tok/s	RTX 3060 12GB fits	Winner
Qwen3-0.6B	0.8	651.5 est.	Yes	286.4 est.	Yes	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
gemma-3-1b-it	1.0	521.2 est.	Yes	229.1 est.	Yes	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct	1.2	434.3 est.	Yes	190.9 est.	Yes	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Qwen3-1.7B	2.0	260.6 est.	Yes	114.5 est.	Yes	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Qwen3-30B-A3B	30.5	173.7 est.	Yes	93.0 est.	No	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	30.5	173.7 est.	Yes	93.0 est.	No	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
GLM-4.7-Flash	31.2	173.7 est.	Yes	89.3 est.	No	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507	30.5	173.7 est.	Yes	93.0 est.	No	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct	81.3	173.7 est.	Yes	14.6 est.	No	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Qwen3-Coder-Next	79.7	173.7 est.	Yes	15.2 est.	No	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct	3.2	154.6 measured	Yes	122.9 measured	Yes	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Phi-4-mini-instruct	3.8	137.2 est.	Yes	60.3 est.	Yes	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Phi-4-mini-reasoning	3.8	137.2 est.	Yes	60.3 est.	Yes	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
gemma-3-4b-it	4.3	133.6 est.	Yes	58.7 est.	Yes	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB
Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507	4.0	130.3 est.	Yes	57.3 est.	Yes	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB

est. = bandwidth-based estimate; measured = curated real benchmark that overrides the estimate. Fits = weights + KV(8K) + 1 GB overhead ≤ 95% of VRAM.

Fit coverage at Q4 / 8K

	Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB	RTX 3060 12GB
Catalog models that fit	47 of 61	18 of 61
Largest exclusive fit	DeepSeek-V4-Flash (158.1B)	—

Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB details → · RTX 3060 12GB details →