Best Mac for 70B and larger local LLMs
Large models need a Mac with a lot of memory, so this page covers Macs with 48 GB or more. Most large models people run now are mixture-of-experts models, and the ranking uses whichever large model the most of these Macs have been measured on.
What is the best Mac for 70B and larger models?
Measured on Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active at 4-bit, the fastest Mac people have reported is M4 Max 128GB, at 57.2 tokens per second (median of 2 runs). M5 Max 128GB follows at 55.0 tokens per second (one run), then M3 Ultra 512GB at 28.0 tokens per second (median of 2 runs). The table lists every Mac with a run of this model.
Speed only matters if the model fits. Check what fits on your Mac.
Ranked on Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active at 4-bit
Median tokens per second from plain runs: one Mac, one request, no speculative decoding, and the whole model in its memory. A run that kept part of the model in system RAM or on disk isn't ranked, because then the CPU and its memory set the pace as much as the Mac. The runs still differ in engine and context, and a long context can cut decode speed sharply, so each row shows what its median came from. Read a small gap between two rows as noise. Every Qwen3.8 report
| # | Mac | Memory | Gen t/s | PP t/s | Gen runs | Engine and context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | M4 Max 128GB | 128 GBunified | 57.2 | 586.01 run | 2 | oMLX, 1 not statedcontext not stated |
| 2 | M5 Max 128GB | 128 GBunified | 55.0 | - | 1 | engine not statedcontext not stated |
| 3 | M3 Ultra 512GB | 512 GBunified | 28.0 | 558.81 run | 2 | llama.cpp, oMLX250K context, 1 not stated |
| 4 | M3 Ultra 256GB | 256 GBunified | 25.7 | - | 1 | engine not statedcontext not stated |
No speed reports yet
These match the profile, but nobody has reported a plain run on them.
What to look for
Memory size is the gate
macOS keeps part of the memory back from the GPU, so a Mac needs more memory than the model's size alone. The calculator grades your exact Mac against its real limit and prints the command that raises it.
Max or Ultra
An Ultra is two Max chips joined together, with about twice the memory bandwidth. It doesn't generate twice as fast, and the table shows the real gap on the same model.
Frequently asked
What's the smallest Mac that can run a large model?
It depends on the model and quant. Pick your Mac in the calculator's Mac tab and it lists the large models that fit and the quant to use.
How is this list ranked?
Every Mac is ranked on its median speed for one large reference model at one quant level, counting plain runs on a single machine only. The reference is the model of 60B parameters or more that the most of these Macs have reports of.