Mac Studio vs. Nvidia: Running Large Models Locally!
Can a Mac Studio actually replace an expensive Nvidia-powered AI rig? In this video, I’m testing a brand new Mac Studio (128GB RAM) to see if it can handle massive 120 Billion parameter models locally. We’ll dive into hardware specs, power consumption, and thermal performance, then walk through setting up a self-contained AI server using LM Studio. I also show you how to connect a MacBook Pro to your Mac Studio using the Continue extension in VS Code to run a fully local AI coding agent that can read and write files without an internet connection. Topics Covered: - Mac Studio for Large Language Models (LLMs). - Power usage, noise, and temperature benchmarks. - Running GPT-OSS 120B & specialized healthcare vision models. - Setting up LM Studio as a local server. - Integrating local AI into VS Code with the Continue extension. 🔔 **Subscribe** for more hands‑on cloud tutorials! *To follow along, check out my GitHub page! All the commands and instructions from this video are in a README file:* *https://github.com/heavy-metal-cloud/youtube/tree/main/videos/bare-metal-ai/01-hardware-mac-studio* 00:00:31 Hardware Specs 00:01:19 Installing LM Studio 00:02:30 Benchmarks: Power, Heat, and Noise 00:03:51 Testing Vision Models (Healthcare AI) 00:05:00 Turning Mac Studio into an AI Server 00:06:06 Connecting VS Code via Continue Extension 00:06:41 Configuring the Local AI Agent 00:07:44 Demo: Remote Coding Agent in Action Links referenced in this video: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/ https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-120b https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-20b https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-studio https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/medgemma/ https://huggingface.co/google/medgemma-1.5-4b-it https://docs.mistral.ai/models/devstral-small-2-25-12 https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Devstral-Small-2-24B-Instruct-2512 https://lmstudio.ai/ https://docs.continue.dev/ https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Continue.continue Amazon Affiliate Links https://amzn.to/4cHEvjq