M4 32GB vs M4 Max 36GB for local LLMs
14 reports on the M4 32GB and 2 on the M4 Max 36GB
Which is faster for local LLMs?
Nobody has reported the same model at the same quant on both cards yet, so there's no measured head-to-head. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 3.4x higher on the M4 Max 36GB (120 GB/s on the M4 32GB, 410 on the M4 Max 36GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M4 32GB
- Memory
- 32GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 120 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 4.3 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 14
M4 Max 36GB
- Memory
- 36GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 410 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 14.7 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 2
Estimated by the calculator
The quant the calculator recommends for each card and its estimated speed at a 32,768-token context with 32 GB of system RAM, from memory bandwidth and the model's shape.
| Model | M4 32GB | M4 Max 36GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 6.8 t/sQ4_K_S | 15.9 t/sQ5_K_M |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 24.6 t/sQ3_K_M | 61.3 t/sQ4_K_M |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 6.8 t/sQ4_K_S | 15.9 t/sQ5_K_M |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 14.9 t/sQ4_K_M | 40.5 t/sQ5_K_M |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M4 32GB · M4 Max 36GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M4 32GB · M4 Max 36GB