Builds / $50k tier

The $30k question

The budget from the 'Mac Studios or Spark?' thread: one 512GB Mac Studio, the big models, no cloud bill.

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTY: 2 OF 4 ยท SEAT AND GO
How hard is this to assemble? two boxes, both prebuilt: seat nothing, configure software only

This answers the question that keeps showing up on X: I have 20 to 30 thousand dollars, what do I buy? The answer for running the biggest open models locally is unified memory, and the 512GB M4 Ultra is how you get 512GB in one quiet box. Every model that matters in 2026 runs here, at full context, in your office.

WHO THIS BUILD IS FOR

You want the frontier, at home, and you want it to be silent. The 512GB box runs the biggest open models at the context lengths they were designed for. A researcher or founder who reads model releases the morning they ship and wants to run them that afternoon, alone, on their own desk.

ESTIMATED TOTAL
$11,998
at MSRP, not yet price-checked
first check: next Monday

The parts

Mac Studio M4 Ultra 512GB
Mac Studio M4 Ultra 512GB x1 512GB 1092GB/s apple
512GB unified memory: the whole reason this build exists. GLM 5.3, DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K3, Nex-N2.5 at real context.
at MSRP, not yet price-checked
$9,999
NVIDIA RTX 5090 32GB
NVIDIA RTX 5090 32GB x1 32GB 1792GB/s nvidia
Output head: video and image generation, where NVIDIA still leads.
at MSRP, not yet price-checked
$1,999

What it runs

GLM 5.3
743B total MoE: 4-bit is about 371GB in 512GB. The full frontier model at real context, in one box.
DeepSeek V4 Pro
1.6T total MoE: 2-bit is about 400GB in 512GB. It fits, but that quant costs quality; GLM 5.3 is the honest daily model here.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
4-bit is about 276GB in 512GB: the fast-everything model runs comfortably here.
WHAT IT WILL NOT RUN

Kimi K3 (2.8T is 700GB at 2-bit, no quant we would recommend fits). And NVIDIA-first video stacks: the 5090 in this build is the video head for a reason.

POWER, NOISE, AND THE ROOM IT LIVES IN

About 300W under load: quieter than a gaming laptop, cooler than its price suggests. One cable, one outlet. The setup is software, not tools.