Can MacBook Pro M5 Max 36 GB run Recursive Flint (40B-A2.5B)?
36 GB unified · 460 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 acceptable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: MXFP4 (20 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 120–200 tok/s, leaving about 7.4 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 | 120–200 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Excellent | MXFP4 | 110–190 tok/s | ≈1 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Acceptable | MXFP4 | 95–160 tok/s | ≈3 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Acceptable | MXFP4 | 85–150 tok/s | ≈3 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Comfortable | MXFP4 | 60–100 tok/s | ≈10 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 MacBook Pro M5 Max 36 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B95–160 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B65–110 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B130–220 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B95–160 tok/sExcellent
- gpt-oss-20b80–130 tok/sExcellent
- GLM-4.7-Flash (30B-A3B)95–150 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.