Can the Apple M4 Max (128GB) run Qwen3 30B-A3B?
Yes
QuantFP16Full quality
Memory62.4 GBof 96 GB
Speed~50tokens/s
Yes. The Apple M4 Max (128GB) can run Qwen3 30B-A3B fully in unified memory at FP16 (full quality), using about 62.4 GB of the 96 GB available, at roughly 50 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 96 GB of the 128 GB unified memory by default.
| Quant | Quality | Memory | Fits? | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 | Full quality | 62.4 GB | Fits | ~50 tok/s |
| Q8_0 | Near-lossless | 33.8 GB | Fits | ~93 tok/s |
| Q6_K | Excellent | 26.4 GB | Fits | ~121 tok/s |
| Q5_K_M | Very good | 23.1 GB | Fits | ~140 tok/s |
| Q4_K_M | Good, most popular | 19.9 GB | Fits | ~164 tok/s |
| Q3_K_M | Noticeably degraded | 16.3 GB | Fits | ~203 tok/s |
| Q2_K | Heavily degraded | 12.8 GB | Fits | ~265 tok/s |
How to run Qwen3 30B-A3B on the Apple M4 Max (128GB)
With Ollama installed, one command downloads and starts it:
ollama run qwen3:30bOllama's default download is Q4_K_M (about 19.9 GB here). You have room for FP16, which is full quality: pick that GGUF in LM Studio or from Hugging Face.
GPUs that run Qwen3 30B-A3B comfortably
- NVIDIA RTX 3090 (24 GB)
- AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (24 GB)
- NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB)
- Apple M2 Pro (32GB)
- NVIDIA RTX 5090 (32 GB)
Models that run well on the Apple M4 Max (128GB)
Run it in the cloud
Don't want to buy hardware? Run Qwen3 30B-A3B on a rented GPU today.
Rent a cloud GPU by the hour. No upfront cost, cancel any time.