Working drawing 02 · Your Mac← Benchmarks
What fits your Mac.
Pick how much memory your Mac has to see which of the models we’ve tested will load on it, smallest first. Each says how much memory it needs, and links to how it did.
- Model files
- 68
- Macs measured
- 4
- Context allowed
- 8K
GPU memory read from Metal on 4 Macs, 2026-10-20, macOS 26, default settings.
- guardian-3.1-2b-Q4_K_M.ggufno write-up
Needs about 2.8 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
- Gemma 4 E2BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 3.3 GB (measured) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
The base model for the tagger fine-tune, and the smallest thing worth measuring.
- Ternary-Bonsai-8B-PQ2_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 3.5 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
- NeoHorse-1-4B-Q4_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 4.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.5-4B-Q4_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 4.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
- Spark-X2.5-4B (XHToken)Measured, not seated
Needs about 4.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
Hybrid attention - one full-attention layer per three sliding-window layers - giving a native 1M context. Apache 2.0, 20T training tokens, marketed for agentic workflows with claimed native compatibility for Codex, Claude Code and Hermes.
- MiniCPM5-2B-Q8_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 4.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
- K2-Horizon-3.7B (IFM) · q4_0another build
Needs about 4.5 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
- K2-Horizon-3.7B (IFM)Seated · Dispatch
Needs about 4.7 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
The smallest model measured that perceives tool need. Held at three precisions (Q4/Q8/BF16) which made it the subject of the precision ladder.
- Gemma 4 E2B · mlx 4bitanother build
Needs about 5.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 8 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3-8B · q4_0another build
Needs about 6.6 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Granite Guardian 4.1 8B · q4_0another build
Needs about 6.6 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3-8BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 6.9 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
The small reference and runtime test subject - the only model held in GGUF, MLX-native and BF16 simultaneously, which carried the whole runtime comparison. HumanEval 86.8% strict, beating qwen3.6-35b-a3b by being less verbose.
- Granite Guardian 4.1 8BSeated · Screen
Needs about 7.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
A purpose-built safety and screening classifier, tested for the judge seat where a general model was overkill.
- gemma-4-E4B_q4_0-it.ggufno write-up
Needs about 7.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- LFM 2.5 8B-A1BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 7.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
Tested as an extremely sparse small MoE, 1B active, to find the floor of useful.
- K2-Horizon-3.7B (IFM) · q8_0another build
Needs about 7.3 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Ornith-1.5-9B-Q4_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 7.4 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- K2-Horizon-7B-Q4_K_M.ggufno write-up
Needs about 7.5 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.5-9B-Q4_K_M.ggufno write-up
Needs about 7.6 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-PTQ1_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 7.9 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Gemma 4 12BSeated · Tag
Needs about 8.1 GB (measured) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
Tested as a cheap tagger after the 80B proved expensive for a task that runs constantly.
- Qwen3.8 27B · iq1_sanother build
Needs about 8.2 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Ternary-Bonsai-27B (PQ2_0)Measured, not seated
Needs about 9.3 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
prism-ml's group-128 ternary pack, built for their own llama.cpp fork's hybrid-attention kernels. The upstream Q2_g64 variant lacks them.
- Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-PQ2_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 9.4 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Ternary-Bonsai-27B (prism-ml)Measured, not seated
Needs about 9.8 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
End-to-end ternary weights on a Qwen3.6-27B backbone with ~75% linear attention, claiming 262K context and 94.6% of FP16 intelligence retained. 11.7 GB resident at a 128k window - a third of K2-36B for the same context.
- Underdog-Saluki-27B-1.0-IQ2-mix.ggufno write-up
Needs about 10.2 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Ternary-Bonsai-27B (prism-ml) · mlx 2bit g128another build
Needs about 10.9 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Ternary-Bonsai-27B (prism-ml) · mlx 2bit g128another build
Needs about 10.9 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3-8B · mlx 8bitanother build
Needs about 11.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 16 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.5-9B-Q8_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 12.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 18 GB Mac or bigger
- K2-Horizon-7B-Q8_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 12.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 18 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.8-9B-Distill (Q8_0)Measured, not seated
Needs about 12.4 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 18 GB Mac or bigger
Full-parameter distillation of Qwen3.8 2.4T A95B into the Qwen3.5-9B architecture, ~70k curated teacher traces. Tested as a cheap utility seat.
- K2-Horizon-3.7B (IFM) · bf16another build
Needs about 12.8 GB (estimate) · Loads on an 18 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.8 27B · mixedanother build
Needs about 15.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 24 GB Mac or bigger
- gpt-oss-20b-MXFP4.ggufno write-up
Needs about 15.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 24 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.8-27B GSQ-RCO IQ3_S (ISTA-DASLab)Measured, not seated
Needs about 15.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 24 GB Mac or bigger
Same weights as qwen3.8-27b at ~3 bits instead of ~4.5, with the quantisation type chosen per tensor by gradient search under a size budget. Retains the MTP head. 26% fewer bytes per token and 8% faster.
- Devstral Small 2 24BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 17.9 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
A coding model, tested to see whether coding tuning transfers to structured extraction.
- Muse-Glimmer 30BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 18.0 GB (measured) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
Previously dismissed at 10.4 tok/s without ever being scored. Re-examined because it is multimodal, and scanned invoices are the part of the accountancy job nothing else can read.
- Qwen3.8 27B · q4_0another build
Needs about 19.3 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.8 27BSeated · agentic
Needs about 20.2 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
The dense counterweight to the MoE fleet, and the model where MLX first beat llama.cpp. Promoted to the agent seat on 2026-09-09 after toolcall/1.
- Granite 4.2 30B · mlx 4bitanother build
Needs about 20.2 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
- diffusiongemma-26b-mlx-4bitno write-up
Needs about 20.3 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
- GLM-4.7-Flash · Q4_0another build
Needs about 21.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.8 27B · splash-packed-q4another build
Needs about 21.2 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
- Granite 4.2 30BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 21.6 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
Tested because IBM builds explicitly for structured JSON output, and nullschema is the weakest axis across the whole fleet.
- K2-Horizon-7B-BF16.ggufno write-up
Needs about 22.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3 Coder 30BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 22.6 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
The first coding model measured against a real coding contract rather than an extraction suite.
- laguna-xs2-mlx-q4no write-up
Needs about 22.9 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 32 GB Mac or bigger
- Ornith 1.5 35B · mlx 4bitanother build
Needs about 23.7 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 36 GB Mac or bigger
- edge0-35bno write-up
Needs about 23.9 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 36 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 24.8 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 36 GB Mac or bigger
Tested as the fast general MoE, and used as the daily coding driver in DSH. Moved to an MLX build on 2026-09-09.
- Ornith 1.5 35B · q4_0another build
Needs about 24.8 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 36 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B · splash-packed-q4-moeanother build
Needs about 25.4 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 36 GB Mac or bigger
- Agents-A1 35BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 25.6 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 36 GB Mac or bigger
An agent-tuned MoE, tested on the tool suites where its specialism should show.
- K2-Horizon-36B-A4B (IFM) · q4_0another build
Needs about 25.8 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 36 GB Mac or bigger
- BTL-4 (Q4_K_M)Measured, not seated
Needs about 26.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 36 GB Mac or bigger
Fine-tuned from Ornith-1.0-35B on an execution-gated corpus: trajectories kept only where the code ran and passed. 256 experts, 8 routed, 262k native context, ~20 KB/token KV.
- Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_M.ggufno write-up
Needs about 26.8 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 48 GB Mac or bigger
- K2-Horizon-36B-A4B (IFM)Seated · agent
Needs about 27.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 48 GB Mac or bigger
MoVA (Mixture-of-Value Attention) extends sparsity into the value component of attention. 4B active gives it 25 tok/s at 5k where a dense 27B manages 8.6. Ties the top of the board on tool invocation and holds a 200-step chain without deviating.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B · Q5_K_Manother build
Needs about 32.5 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 48 GB Mac or bigger
- Ornith 1.5 35BMeasured, not seated
Needs about 35.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 48 GB Mac or bigger
A second non-Qwen coding candidate, tested alongside Devstral.
- Sakura-Kolibri-1-365E-IQ3_XXS-27.45GiB.ggufno write-up
Needs about 35.3 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 48 GB Mac or bigger
- GLM-4.7-FlashMeasured, not seated
Needs about 38.1 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 64 GB Mac or bigger
Tested as a fast MoE with a 202k context window, and as the first model we quantised ourselves for MLX.
- Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B Instruct, REAP prunedMeasured, not seated
Needs about 39.0 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 64 GB Mac or bigger
Tested to find out whether expert pruning costs the extraction seat its abstention. The full model holds that seat at 40 GB, which is most of the memory budget on a 64 GB machine.
- Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B Instruct, REAP pruned · Q4_K_Manother build
Needs about 43.8 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 64 GB Mac or bigger
- K2-Horizon-36B-A4B (IFM) · q8_0another build
Needs about 47.4 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 64 GB Mac or bigger
- Qwen3-Coder-Next-IQ4_XS.ggufno write-up
Needs about 50.7 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 64 GB Mac or bigger
- Kolibri-1-Q4_0.ggufno write-up
Needs about 52.4 GB (estimate) · Loads on a 96 GB Mac or bigger
macOS doesn’t hand all of a Mac’s memory to the graphics chip that runs the model. It keeps the rest for itself and your apps. This is how much it gave on each of our Macs, with nothing changed.
| Mac memory | The model can use | Model files that fit | How we know |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 GB | about 5.9 GB | 10 of 68 | Estimate: 74%, the lowest share we measured |
| 16 GB | 11.8 GB | 30 of 68 | Measured on our M1 Mac mini and M4 Mac mini |
| 18 GB | about 13.3 GB | 34 of 68 | Estimate: 74%, the lowest share we measured |
| 24 GB | 17.8 GB | 37 of 68 | Measured on our M4 Pro Mac mini |
| 32 GB | about 23.7 GB | 49 of 68 | Estimate: 74%, the lowest share we measured |
| 36 GB | about 26.6 GB | 57 of 68 | Estimate: 74%, the lowest share we measured |
| 48 GB | about 35.5 GB | 62 of 68 | Estimate: 74%, the lowest share we measured |
| 64 GB | 51.8 GB | 67 of 68 | Measured on our M1 Max Mac Studio |
| 96 GB | about 71.0 GB | 68 of 68 | Estimate: 74%, the lowest share we measured |
| 128 GB | about 94.7 GB | 68 of 68 | Estimate: 74%, the lowest share we measured |
Written up, or measured only. Models with a written entry say why we tried them and what came of it. The rest are listed by their file name, as the run log measured them, with their best score; their pages have every run.
A model has to fit in that memory, with room for what it’s reading. That room is its context: the conversation or document it holds at once. Every figure here allows for 8K tokens of context, roughly 6,000 words.
Measured, or estimated. Where we’ve measured a model, the figure is the memory it actually used. Where we haven’t, it’s an estimate: the size of the model file, plus a quarter, plus 1 GB. That estimate comes out on the safe side for every model we have measured.
More context needs more memory, and how much more varies a lot. Going from 8K to 128K tokens, one model we measured needed about 10 GB more and another under 1 GB. The context ladder has the measurements.
Fitting isn’t the same as fast. The speeds on this site were measured on the Mac Studio’s M1 Max. A Mac with slower memory, such as a base M1 or M4, writes text more slowly.
What’s not here. 9 rejected or removed models are left out, along with any other run of their files. 33 of the 174 configurations we measured have no recorded size, because their files have since been deleted. They’re all on the models page.