Best local LLMs by hardware tier
Rankings only make sense once you fix the hardware. Pick a tier below — the leaderboard re-sorts to the models the community actually runs there, weighted by report count, fastest observed tokens-per-second, and recency.
Apple Silicon 48–96 GB
Mid-range Apple Silicon. 70B-class fits in Q4 with bandwidth-limited speed. Ranked from 5 reports.
| # | Model family | Best variant tested | Reports | Fastest t/s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gemma 4Google DeepMind 31B Instruct · 31B · Q8 · on M4 Max 64GB | 31B Instruct · 31B · Q8 on M4 Max 64GB | 4 | 23.0 |
| 2 | Qwen3.6Alibaba — · on M5 Max 64GB | — on M5 Max 64GB | 1 | 32.0 |
How we rank
A single global "best models" list doesn't really exist — what runs well on a 5090 is often unrunnable on a 4060, and a 7B that screams on an M3 Max is usually a poor pick on an H100. So we fix the hardware first, then rank the families that actually have community reports on it. The score blends popularity (log-scaled report count), fastest observed tokens-per-second normalized within the bucket, recency (90-day half-life), and a small bias for rows where we know the variant + quant + GPU cleanly. Click into a family for the full breakdown of records.