For a MBP I have 48 GB of RAM M5 Pro. It runs at about 12-14 t/s at Q4, you could probably optimize it further. RAM is not a limitation but overall memory bandwidth. Q8 is slower. 35B A3B Qwen is quite speedy, but a little less accurate. With Qwen 3.6 27B dense I can squeeze a 9B parameter model and use that for fast analysis or code scanning while 27B is churning on a task in the background. It is tight, but totally reasonable.

The real sweet spot for Qwen 27B is getting it on something like a Dual 3090 system or some other config where it can blaze at 50-80 t/s and that costs well under 6K currently. It is a surprisingly capable model. Using something like GLM for orchestration, specs, task farming and then letting Qwen churn is relatively inexpensive.

Overall I recommend people try models of this class out using OpenCode and some for pay service to experiment with them and understand how they work. I find they are very useful.

Long term, I am convinced enough that if I wanted to use local models for any number of reasons I would be okay investing in a dual GPU box. The Mac is not fast enough for me and M5 Max is just too expensive relative to GPU linux box. Still, it is nice to have the models local ON the laptop and it is useful for what I care about locally.

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coder543 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> For a MBP I have 48 GB of RAM M5 Pro. It runs at about 12-14 t/s at Q4

Are you running with MTP enabled? I have seen some people on M5 hardware report 20+ t/s on Qwen3.6-27B using MTP... and I think that was a regular M5, not even M5 Pro.

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bitexploder 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

Nope. MLX in LMStudio. The simplest config with zero tuning effort.

	▲	coder543 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Unsloth Studio is also very low effort, and a lot better than LM Studio in my opinion. (Performance, compatibility with Gemma 4, actually open source, etc.)

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aunty_helen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I was doing some benchmarking last night on 2 3090s. The systems but old but I’m seeing 11tks 27b, 15tks 35b MoE.

The limited context is problematic. I’m not exactly sure what it’s got available but hermes was hit and miss on a prospecting job.

It does seem to be doing useful work but it’s not API call level quality

	▲	coder543 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> The systems but old but I’m seeing 11tks 27b, 15tks 35b MoE If that's accurate, then you must be doing something wrong/weird. On a single RTX 3090, I'm seeing substantially higher performance. Dual GPU won't necessarily give a ton of performance improvement, but it shouldn't hurt performance. With llama-bench, I just measured Qwen3.6-27B at 41 tok/s and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B at 153 tok/s on one RTX 3090. (Those results are without MTP. With MTP, I'm seeing about 65 to 70 tok/s for Qwen3.7-27B.) I'm using the unsloth UD-Q4_K_XL quant. If you're using bf16 for some reason, that could explain the low performance and inability to have enough context despite having 48GB of VRAM, I guess, but... don't do that.