Can MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48 GB run Llama 3.3 70B Instruct?
48 GB unified · 307 GB/s memory bandwidth · Llama 3.3 70B Instruct has 70.6B parameters.
Short answer
Yes, acceptable for chat; doesn't fit for coding in a repository.
Best quantization for chat: 3-bit (29 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 4.7–8 tok/s, leaving about 5.6 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 | Acceptable | 3-bit | 4.7–8 tok/s | ≈6 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Borderline | 3-bit | 4.6–8 tok/s | ≈40 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
Speeds are bandwidth-based estimates; no direct benchmark exists for this pair. “First reply” is the time to read the workload’s opening prompt. How we calculate
Get it running
Copy-paste commands for the 3-bit build with a 8K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-GGUF:Q3_K_M
Downloads 34.27 GB (Q3_K_M). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=8192 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B55–90 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B35–60 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B55–90 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B90–150 tok/sExcellent
- gpt-oss-20b55–90 tok/sExcellent
- GLM-4.7-Flash (30B-A3B)45–75 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Llama 3.3 70B Instruct
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Desktop PC · 2× GeForce RTX 3090 (48 GB) · 128 GB RAM$2,884 · 11–18 tok/sComfortable
- Mac Studio M5 Ultra 128 GB$5,499 · 10–16 tok/sComfortable
- Mac Studio M5 Ultra 256 GB$6,299 · 10–16 tok/sComfortable
- Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512 GB$7,099 · 10–16 tok/sComfortable
- Desktop PC · RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell · 128 GB RAM$17,284 · 17–25 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.