Can Mac Studio M5 Ultra 128 GB run Recursive Flint (40B-A2.5B)?
128 GB unified · 1228 GB/s memory bandwidth · Recursive Flint (40B-A2.5B) has 39.8B parameters (2.5B active per token).
Short answer
Yes, excellent for chat and comfortable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: MXFP4 (20 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 250–420 tok/s, leaving about 97 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 | MXFP4 | 250–420 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Excellent | MXFP4 | 240–390 tok/s | under 1 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Comfortable | MXFP4 | 200–330 tok/s | ≈1 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Comfortable | MXFP4 | 180–300 tok/s | ≈2 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Excellent | MXFP4 | 120–210 tok/s | ≈4 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
Other models for Mac Studio M5 Ultra 128 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- gpt-oss-120b120–210 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B140–240 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct140–230 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B110–190 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B140–240 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B280–460 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Recursive Flint (40B-A2.5B)
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Mac mini M4 32 GB$1,399 · 40–55 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Ryzen 9 9950X (no GPU) · 64 GB DDR5$1,400 · 20–35 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 32 GB RAM$1,500 · 95–160 tok/sExcellent
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 64 GB$1,600 · 100–140 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 64 GB RAM$1,628 · 95–160 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M2 Pro 32 GB$1,699 · 65–90 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.