Can the Apple M4 Pro (48GB) run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B?
Yes
QuantQ6_KExcellent
Memory29.6 GBof 36 GB
Speed~6tokens/s
Yes. The Apple M4 Pro (48GB) can run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B fully in unified memory at Q6_K (excellent), using about 29.6 GB of the 36 GB available, at roughly 6 tokens/second.
Try other context lengths in the calculator →Memory needed by quantization
At 8,192 tokens of context. macOS lets the GPU use about 36 GB of the 48 GB unified memory by default.
| Quant | Quality | Memory | Fits? | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 | Full quality | 68.3 GB | Too big | — |
| Q8_0 | Near-lossless | 37.6 GB | Too big | — |
| Q6_K | Excellent | 29.6 GB | Fits | ~6 tok/s |
| Q5_K_M | Very good | 26.1 GB | Fits | ~7 tok/s |
| Q4_K_M | Good, most popular | 22.6 GB | Fits | ~8 tok/s |
| Q3_K_M | Noticeably degraded | 18.8 GB | Fits | ~10 tok/s |
| Q2_K | Heavily degraded | 15 GB | Fits | ~13 tok/s |
How to run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B on the Apple M4 Pro (48GB)
With Ollama installed, one command downloads and starts it:
ollama run deepseek-r1:32bOllama's default download is Q4_K_M (about 22.6 GB here). You have room for Q6_K, which is excellent: pick that GGUF in LM Studio or from Hugging Face.
GPUs that run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B comfortably
- NVIDIA RTX 3090 (24 GB)
- AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (24 GB)
- NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB)
- NVIDIA RTX 5090 (32 GB)
- Apple M3 Max (64GB)
Models that run well on the Apple M4 Pro (48GB)
Run it in the cloud
Don't want to buy hardware? Run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B on a rented GPU today.
Rent a cloud GPU by the hour. No upfront cost, cancel any time.