Home / Can I run it? / Qwen3-30B-A3B / Qwen3-30B-A3B on a Mac mini 32GB

Yes, but it is tight. Qwen3-30B-A3B at Q4_K_M needs about 22.3 GB, and the Mac mini M6 32GB has 24.0 GB usable at a ~4k context.

Can I run Qwen3-30B-A3B on a Mac mini 32GB?

Qwen3-30B-A3B at Q4_K_M needs about 22.3 GB, and the Mac mini M6 32GB has 24.0 GB usable. That figure is 32 GB of unified memory on the spec sheet, of which 24.0 GB is usable for weights and cache, at 170 GB/s memory bandwidth. A Qwen3 Mixture-of-Experts with 30B total weights and about 3B active per token, so it needs 30B-class memory but can decode closer to a small dense model. These are estimates from our formula, not measured benchmarks.

Quant that fits

Q4_K_M Fits, short context only

Memory needed

22.3 GB at Q4_K_M, ~4k context

Usable unified memory

24.0 GB of 32 GB unified memory

Est. tokens/sec

up to 75 estimate

Qwen3-30B-A3B · Mac mini M6 32GB · Everything this machine runs · Q4 vs Q8 vs FP16

Memory at each quant

Estimated tokens per second

Estimate: up to 75 tokens/sec at Q4_K_M (upper bound: this is a Mixture-of-Experts, and only the active weights are counted). This is a bandwidth-derived range, not a bench. Efficiency is a 45–80% unified-memory band from How we calculate.

Context headroom

At Q4_K_M, this machine has headroom out to about 16k tokens under our KV estimate. Longer chats need more memory for the cache. Figures assume an FP16 KV cache.

From the model’s config. Try other sizes in the VRAM calculator or see the context length guide.

What to do instead

• Run Qwen3.8-27B instead (20.4 GB at Q4). It is a different model, not a drop-in, but it does fit this machine.
• Q8_0 needs 38.3 GB and does not fit here. The Mac mini M5 Pro 64GB has 48.0 GB usable, enough for Q8.
• See the best GPU for this model family and the Qwen3-30B-A3B model page.

Other hardware for Qwen3-30B-A3B

• Qwen3-30B-A3B on an RTX 3060 12GBWon’t fit
• Qwen3-30B-A3B on an RTX 3070 TiWon’t fit
• Qwen3-30B-A3B on an RTX 3080Won’t fit
• Qwen3-30B-A3B on an RTX 3090Tight
• Qwen3-30B-A3B on an RTX 4060 Ti 16GBWon’t fit
• Qwen3-30B-A3B on an RTX 4070 Ti SuperWon’t fit

Other models on a Mac mini 32GB

• Qwen3-32B on a Mac mini 32GBTight
• Qwen3.8-27B on a Mac mini 32GBFits
• Gemma 3 27B on a Mac mini 32GBFits
• Gemma 4 31B on a Mac mini 32GBTight
• gpt-oss-20b on a Mac mini 32GBFits
• Mistral Small 24B on a Mac mini 32GBFits