Can the Apple M3 Max (64GB) run Qwen2.5 32B?
Yes
QuantQ8_0Near-lossless
Memory37.6 GBof 48 GB
Speed~7tokens/s
Yes. The Apple M3 Max (64GB) can run Qwen2.5 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 Qwen2.5 32B on the Apple M3 Max (64GB)
With Ollama installed, one command downloads and starts it:
ollama run qwen2.5:32bOllama'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 Qwen2.5 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 Qwen2.5 32B on a rented GPU today.
Rent a cloud GPU by the hour. No upfront cost, cancel any time.