Can MacBook Pro M3 Max 48 GB run Gemma 4 31B?
48 GB unified · 400 GB/s memory bandwidth · Gemma 4 31B has 31.3B parameters.
Short answer
Yes, comfortable for chat and acceptable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: 5-bit (20 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 11–15 tok/s, leaving about 16 GB free for your other apps.
How it rates for each workload
Same model and machine, different jobs. Agents and long documents send far bigger prompts than chat, so they need much more speed and memory.
| Workload | Verdict | Quant | Generation | First reply | Context | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chatwith Open WebUI | Comfortable | 5-bit | 11–15 tok/s | ≈5 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Acceptable | 5-bit | 11–15 tok/s | ≈30 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Acceptable | 4-bit | 13–17 tok/s | ≈90 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Acceptable | 4-bit | 12–17 tok/s | ≈2 min | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Acceptable | 5-bit | 9–13 tok/s | ≈6 min | 64K | Details |
Speeds are estimates calibrated against measured benchmarks on similar hardware. “First reply” is the time to read the workload’s opening prompt. How we calculate
Get it running
Copy-paste commands for the 5-bit build with a 64K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/gemma-4-31B-it-GGUF:Q5_K_M
Downloads 21.66 GB (Q5_K_M). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=65536 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for MacBook Pro M3 Max 48 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B85–120 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B55–80 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B85–120 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B140–190 tok/sExcellent
- gpt-oss-20b85–110 tok/sExcellent
- GLM-4.7-Flash (30B-A3B)70–95 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Gemma 4 31B
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 32 GB RAM$1,500 · 9–16 tok/sComfortable
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 64 GB$1,600 · 10–14 tok/sComfortable
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 64 GB RAM$1,628 · 9–16 tok/sComfortable
- Desktop PC · GeForce RTX 3090 · 32 GB RAM$1,700 · 30–40 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Radeon RX 7900 XTX · 32 GB RAM$1,800 · 30–45 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · GeForce RTX 3090 · 64 GB RAM$1,828 · 30–40 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.