The pro Mac mini: an M5 Pro with up to 18 CPU and 20 GPU cores, Thunderbolt 5 and twice the M6's memory bandwidth (307GB/s), which is what sets the speed of a local language model. Its 24GB base memory runs 7-14B models; configured with 48GB or 64GB it holds 4-bit models in the 30B class and up, in a box the size of a hardback. For local AI it is the cheapest current Mac with Pro-class bandwidth; for gaming its GPU sits well behind the Mac Studio's.
Against the line-up
Geekbench 6 CPU
Geekbench 6 CPU
Geekbench 6 GPU
Blender Benchmark
The whole Mac mini line-up side by side, with prices
Every benchmark
Quoted from the publications that ran them; we don't test hardware ourselves. Figures from different publications were run on different systems and scenes, so compare within a row's source.
Local LLM (llama.cpp / Ollama)
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Llama 2 7B Q4_0, Generation |
67.6tok/s | llama.cpp community benchmarks (GitHub), Oct 19, 2026 M5 Pro, 16-core GPU, 307GB/s llama-bench tg128 (generating 128 tokens), all layers on the GPU. |
| Llama 2 7B Q4_0, Prompt processing |
1,340tok/s | llama.cpp community benchmarks (GitHub), Oct 19, 2026 M5 Pro, 16-core GPU, 307GB/s llama-bench pp512 (reading a 512-token prompt), all layers on the GPU. |
| Llama 2 7B Q8_0, Generation |
38.9tok/s | llama.cpp community benchmarks (GitHub), Oct 19, 2026 M5 Pro, 16-core GPU, 307GB/s llama-bench tg128 (generating 128 tokens), all layers on the GPU. |
Blender Benchmark
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Standard run |
3,643samples/min | Blender Open Data, Oct 19, 2026 Apple M5 Pro (GPU - 16 cores), Metal, Blender 5.2.0 Median score over the three scenes, 14 submitted runs |
| CPU |
500samples/min | Blender Open Data, Oct 19, 2026 Apple M5 Pro CPU, Blender 5.2.0 Median score over the three scenes, 44 submitted runs. Blender Open Data does not split the 15- and 18-core CPUs. |
Geekbench 6 CPU
| Setting | Result | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-core |
29,104points | The Verge, Sep 21, 2026 Mac mini M5 Pro, CTO 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 48GB, 1TB |
| Single-core |
4,294points | The Verge, Sep 21, 2026 Mac mini M5 Pro, CTO 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 48GB, 1TB |
Geekbench 6 GPU
Sources
- Blender Open Data (results database)
- The Verge (review)
- llama.cpp community benchmarks (GitHub) (results database)
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