Can MacBook Pro M3 Max 128 GB run Recursive Flint (40B-A2.5B)?
128 GB unified · 400 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: 130–170 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 | 130–170 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Excellent | MXFP4 | 120–160 tok/s | ≈3 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Comfortable | MXFP4 | 100–140 tok/s | ≈8 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Comfortable | MXFP4 | 95–130 tok/s | ≈10 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Excellent | MXFP4 | 65–85 tok/s | ≈30 s | 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
Other models for MacBook Pro M3 Max 128 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- gpt-oss-120b65–85 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B75–100 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct70–100 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B55–80 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B75–100 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B140–190 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.