What can I run? · 8K context

MacBook Pro M4 Max 128 GB

Change hardwareCurrently: MacBook Pro M4 Max 128 GB
Not sure what you have? Help me checkTwo numbers decide it: memory, and whether there is a graphics card

On a Mac

Click the Apple logo in the top-left corner of the screen, then About This Mac. Note the Chip (M1, M2, M3, M4…) and the Memory (8 GB, 16 GB…).

On Windows

Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager, then Performance. Memory shows your RAM. If a GPU entry lists Dedicated GPU memory of 4 GB or more, you have a graphics card; otherwise you don’t.

Then pick the closest match — or the Build your own setup option below for anything else:

Still unsure? Start with the 16 GB laptop: what runs there runs on almost any recent computer.

Build your own setupChoose GPUs or a chip and how much memory you have
18run well
0with offload
1too large

Speeds marked measured come from reference results and verified community runs on this exact system; others are estimates.

Start with this one

Qwen3 30B-A3B

Efficient general-purpose model for reasoning, coding and tool use. From Qwen Team (Alibaba Cloud).

Speed
Much faster than you can read estimate~88 tok/s estimate
Download
30.2 GiBQ8_0
Memory
32.7 of 96.0 GB estimatefits entirely
License
PermissiveApache License 2.0

Why this one: a general chat model that fits this machine without spilling out of memory, answers faster than you read, and has the strongest benchmark results among those that do.

Now run it

Easiest: LM Studio free desktop app, no terminal

  1. Download LM Studio from lmstudio.ai, install it and open it.
  2. Open the search tab (the magnifying glass) and search for lmstudio-community/Qwen3-30B-A3B-GGUF.
  3. Choose the Q8_0 download (30.2 GiB) and click Download.
  4. Go to the chat tab, pick Qwen3 30B-A3B at the top, and type your first message.

In a terminal: Ollama one command

  1. Install Ollama from ollama.com/download.
  2. Open a terminal and run:
    ollama run hf.co/lmstudio-community/Qwen3-30B-A3B-GGUF:Q8_0
    The first run downloads the model (30.2 GiB); then type a message and press Enter.

Everything that runs here grouped by how it runs

Runs in accelerator memory 18

Fits entirely in GPU or unified memory — the fast path.

ModelRecommended downloadMemoryGeneration speed
Variant Llama 3.1 70B InstructMeta · 70.6B
1 other option
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well41.4 GiB~9 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M via llama.cpp40.2 GiB · LM Studio Community
44.8 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~8 tok/s estimate
Variant Llama 3.3 70B InstructMeta · 70.6B
2 other options
Q3_K_M · Unsloth AIllama.cppRuns well36.4 GiB~10 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · LM Studio Communityllama.cppRuns well44.8 GiB~8 tok/s estimate
MLX 4-bit via MLX-LM37.0 GiB · MLX Community
41.4 of 96.0 GiB estimate
11.2 tok/s measured
Variant Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1Mistral AI · 46.7B (12.9B active)Q4_K_M via llama.cpp26.6 GiB · LM Studio Community
29.1 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~42 tok/s estimate
Variant Qwen2.5 32B InstructQwen Team (Alibaba Cloud) · 32.8B
2 other options
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well20.4 GiB~19 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · Qwen Team (Alibaba Cloud)llama.cppRuns well21.9 GiB~17 tok/s estimate
Q5_K_M via llama.cpp21.7 GiB · LM Studio Community
25.1 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~15 tok/s estimate
Variant Qwen2.5-Coder 32B InstructQwen Team (Alibaba Cloud) · 32.8B
2 other options
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well20.4 GiB~19 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · Qwen Team (Alibaba Cloud)llama.cppRuns well21.9 GiB~17 tok/s estimate
Q8_0 via llama.cpp32.4 GiB · LM Studio Community
36.2 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~10 tok/s estimate
Variant DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32BQwen Team (Alibaba Cloud) · 32.8B
1 other option
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well20.4 GiB~19 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M via llama.cpp18.7 GiB · LM Studio Community
21.9 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~17 tok/s estimate
Variant Qwen3 30B-A3BQwen Team (Alibaba Cloud) · 30.5B (3.3B active)
5 other options
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well17.9 GiB~148 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · Qwen Team (Alibaba Cloud)llama.cppRuns well19.2 GiB~140 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · Unsloth AIllama.cppRuns well19.3 GiB~139 tok/s estimate
MLX 8-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well32.7 GiB~88 tok/s estimate
Q8_0 · Qwen Team (Alibaba Cloud)llama.cppRuns well32.7 GiB~88 tok/s estimate
Q8_0 via llama.cpp30.2 GiB · LM Studio Community
32.7 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~88 tok/s estimate
Variant Gemma 3 27B ITGoogle DeepMind · 27.4B
1 other option
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well19.3 GiB~22 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M via llama.cpp15.6 GiB · LM Studio Community
20.6 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~21 tok/s estimate
Variant Gemma 2 27B ITGoogle DeepMind · 27.2BQ4_K_M via llama.cpp15.5 GiB · LM Studio Community
19.5 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~21 tok/s estimate
Variant Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501Mistral AI · 23.6B
2 other options
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well14.6 GiB~26 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · LM Studio Communityllama.cppRuns well15.7 GiB~24 tok/s estimate
Q6_K via llama.cpp18.0 GiB · LM Studio Community
20.5 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~18 tok/s estimate
Variant Qwen2.5 14B InstructQwen Team (Alibaba Cloud) · 14.8B
2 other options
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well10.1 GiB~40 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · Qwen Team (Alibaba Cloud)llama.cppRuns well10.7 GiB~37 tok/s estimate
Q6_K via llama.cpp11.3 GiB · LM Studio Community
13.7 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~28 tok/s estimate
Variant Phi-4Microsoft · 14.7B
2 other options
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well10.1 GiB~40 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · LM Studio Communityllama.cppRuns well10.7 GiB~37 tok/s estimate
Q8_0 via llama.cpp14.5 GiB · LM Studio Community
17.1 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~22 tok/s estimate
Variant Gemma 2 9B ITGoogle DeepMind · 9.24BQ4_K_M via llama.cpp5.3 GiB · LM Studio Community
8.6 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~57 tok/s estimate
Variant Hermes 3 Llama 3.1 8BMeta · 8.03B
2 other options
Q4_K_M · NousResearchllama.cppRuns well6.3 GiB~65 tok/s estimate
Q6_K · NousResearchllama.cppRuns well7.9 GiB~50 tok/s estimate
Q8_0 via llama.cpp8.0 GiB · NousResearch
9.8 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~39 tok/s estimate
Variant Llama 3.1 8B InstructMeta · 8.03B
2 other options
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well5.9 GiB~70 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · LM Studio Communityllama.cppRuns well6.3 GiB~65 tok/s estimate
Q8_0 via llama.cpp7.9 GiB · LM Studio Community
9.8 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~39 tok/s estimate
Variant Qwen2.5 7B InstructQwen Team (Alibaba Cloud) · 7.62B
2 other options
MLX 4-bit · MLX CommunityMLX-LMRuns well5.1 GiB~74 tok/s estimate
Q4_K_M · Qwen Team (Alibaba Cloud)llama.cppRuns well5.5 GiB~68 tok/s estimate
Q8_0 via llama.cpp7.5 GiB · Qwen Team (Alibaba Cloud)
8.8 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~41 tok/s estimate
Variant DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7BQwen Team (Alibaba Cloud) · 7.62BQ4_K_M via llama.cpp4.3 GiB · LM Studio Community
5.2 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~68 tok/s estimate
Variant Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3Mistral AI · 7.25B
1 other option
Q4_K_M · LM Studio Communityllama.cppRuns well5.8 GiB~71 tok/s estimate
Q8_0 via llama.cpp7.2 GiB · LM Studio Community
9.0 of 96.0 GiB estimate
~43 tok/s estimate
Too large for this hardware1 model variant
How this is calculatedMemory, fit and speed estimates

Memory = download size + fp16 KV cache for 8K tokens + runtime overhead. Usable memory is 95% of dedicated VRAM, a device-specific share of unified memory (75% by default), and 80% of system RAM for runtimes that can offload. Runtimes must load the file format and support a backend present on the hardware.

Estimated speed is bounded by memory bandwidth ÷ bytes read per token (active parameters for mixture-of-experts), shown in italics with an estimate label and a ±35% range (hover for it). Measured speeds are medians of reference results and verified public community runs on the same system, download and runtime. For each model we recommend the highest-precision download that fits, preferring not to offload.