Will it run? / Nemotron 3.5 lightning 30B (A3B)

Can I run Nemotron 3.5 lightning 30B (A3B) on a Mac or mini PC?

Nemotron 3.5 lightning 30B (A3B) needs about 26.5 GB of memory. It fits on 11 of the 15 machines we track. The cheapest current machine that runs it at a comfortable 10+ tokens/sec is the Mac Studio M5 Max (40-core GPU, 64GB) ($3,799).

25 GBdownload (Q4_K_M)
~26.5 GBmemory needed
2.5 GBread per token (MoE)
11/15machines it fits on
ollama run nemotron-3.5-lightning:30b-a3b
MachineMemoryFits?Tokens/secFrom
Mac Studio M5 Ultra (96GB) 96 GBYes120+
$5,499Check price →
Mac Studio M5 Ultra (256GB) 256 GBYes120+
$9,499Check price →
Mac Studio M5 Max (40-core GPU, 64GB) 64 GBYes109
$3,799Check price →
Mac mini M5 Pro (64GB) 64 GBYes55
Check price →
Mac mini M4 Pro (64GB) older 64 GBYes49
Check price →
NVIDIA DGX Spark (128GB) 128 GBYes43
Check price →
Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC (128GB) 128 GBYes40
Check price →
Mac mini M6 (32GB) 32 GBBarely18
Check price →
Beelink SER7 (Ryzen 7 7840HS, 32GB) 32 GBYes12
Check price →
Minisforum UM790 Pro (Ryzen 9 7940HS, 32GB) 32 GBYes12
Check price →
GEEKOM A6 (Ryzen 7 6800H, 32GB) 32 GBYes10
Check price →
Mac mini M6 (16GB) 16 GBNo–
$899Check price →
Mac mini M5 Pro (24GB) 24 GBNo–
$1,699Check price →
Mac mini M4 (16GB) older 16 GBNo–
Check price →
Mac mini M2 (16GB) older 16 GBNo–
Check price →

This is a mixture-of-experts model: it only reads part of itself for each token, so it runs much faster than its size suggests, but the whole file still has to fit in memory. Around 10 tokens/sec reads comfortably; under 5 feels slow. How we estimate.

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