Can the Apple M3 Max (64GB) run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B?
Yes
QuantQ8_0Near-lossless
Memory37.6 GBof 48 GB
Speed~7tokens/s
Yes. The Apple M3 Max (64GB) can run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B fully in unified memory at Q8_0 (near-lossless), using about 37.6 GB of the 48 GB available, at roughly 7 tokens/second.
Try other context lengths in the calculator →Memory needed by quantization
At 8,192 tokens of context. macOS lets the GPU use about 48 GB of the 64 GB unified memory by default.
| Quant | Quality | Memory | Fits? | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 | Full quality | 68.3 GB | Too big | — |
| Q8_0 | Near-lossless | 37.6 GB | Fits | ~7 tok/s |
| Q6_K | Excellent | 29.6 GB | Fits | ~9 tok/s |
| Q5_K_M | Very good | 26.1 GB | Fits | ~10 tok/s |
| Q4_K_M | Good, most popular | 22.6 GB | Fits | ~12 tok/s |
| Q3_K_M | Noticeably degraded | 18.8 GB | Fits | ~15 tok/s |
| Q2_K | Heavily degraded | 15 GB | Fits | ~20 tok/s |
How to run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B on the Apple M3 Max (64GB)
With Ollama installed, one command downloads and starts it:
ollama run deepseek-r1:32bOllama's default download is Q4_K_M (about 22.6 GB here). You have room for Q8_0, which is near-lossless: pick that GGUF in LM Studio or from Hugging Face.
GPUs that run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B comfortably
- NVIDIA RTX 3090 (24 GB)
- AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (24 GB)
- NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB)
- NVIDIA RTX 5090 (32 GB)
- Apple M4 Pro (48GB)
Models that run well on the Apple M3 Max (64GB)
Run it in the cloud
Don't want to buy hardware? Run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B on a rented GPU today.
Rent a cloud GPU by the hour. No upfront cost, cancel any time.