Can Mac mini M5 Pro 24 GB run Qwen3.5 9B?

24 GB unified · 307 GB/s memory bandwidth · Qwen3.5 9B has 9.7B parameters.

Short answer

Yes, excellent for chat and acceptable or better for every workload we test.

Best quantization for chat: 6-bit (7.6 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 19–30 tok/s, leaving about 7.7 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	Excellent	6-bit	19–30 tok/s	under 1 s	8K	Details
Coding questionswith Continue	Excellent	5-bit	20–35 tok/s	≈5 s	16K	Details
Coding in a repositorywith Aider	Acceptable	6-bit	18–30 tok/s	≈15 s	32K	Details
Agentic codingwith OpenCode	Acceptable	6-bit	17–30 tok/s	≈20 s	32K	Details
Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI	Excellent	5-bit	18–30 tok/s	≈55 s	64K	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 5-bit build with a 64K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.

ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-9B-GGUF:Q5_K_M

Downloads 6.58 GB (Q5_K_M). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=65536 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.

Other models for Mac mini M5 Pro 24 GB

The best-rated models for chat on this machine.

Everything Mac mini M5 Pro 24 GB can run

Cheapest machines for Qwen3.5 9B

Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.

Same chip, other memory: 48 GB, 64 GB

Different tool, context size or workload?

These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.

Open sourceCheck my exact setup