Summary
User benchmarks Qwen 3 14B at 11.5 tok/s on a Mac Mini M4 with 24 GB unified memory.
Setup is MLX with 4-bit quantization, using 8.4 GB peak memory and leaving 74% of system memory free with no swap.
The study also reports Ollama q4_K_M results: Llama 3.2 3B at 42.0 tok/s, Gemma 2 9B at 15.2 tok/s, Qwen 2.5 14B at 10.8 tok/s, and DeepSeek-R1 32B at 0.28 tok/s. MLX Qwen 3 30B-A3B MoE reaches 44.8 tok/s but uses 16.3 GB and causes 2.74 GB swap; Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B crashes with Metal OOM at 20.4 GB. Tests ran under normal workstation load with ~12-13 GB already committed.