Mixtral 8x7B on Apple M3 Pro · 18GB

❌ Won't fit — Mixtral 8x7B @ Q3_K_M
Mixtral 8x7B 8x7B (MoE) at Q3_K_M needs ~23.3 GB (weights 21.3 GB + KV 1.0 GB + overhead 1.1 GB @ 8K ctx) — more than your 9.1 GB usable of 18.0 GB unified. Try a smaller model or a lower quant.
quantneedsspeed
✗ Q8_049.5 GB—
✗ Q5_K_M33.5 GB—
✗ Q4_K_M28.7 GB—
✗ Q3_K_M23.3 GB—

Won't fit here — what hardware runs Mixtral 8x7B? →

runlocal verdict card
download card share on x share on reddit drop it in your model-drop post
Mixtral 8x7B: Won't fit
for your own README — links back here

Same model, other machines: Apple M1 · Apple M1 Pro · Apple M2 · Apple M2 Pro · Apple M4 Pro · Apple M3 Max

Also runs on a Apple M3 Pro: DeepSeek-R1 (distill) · Qwen2.5 · Mistral 7B · Qwen3 · Llama 3.1

Best models for a Apple M3 Pro · 18GB →

Architecturally similar

These share Mixtral 8x7B's KV-cache geometry — they size memory the same way, so here's how they fit on a Apple M3 Pro · 18GB too:

modelsharesverdict here
Qwen2.5-Coder 8kv/128hd ✅ Runs (tight)
Llama 3.2 8kv/128hd ✅ Runs comfortably
Llama 3.3 8kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit
Mistral Small 3 8kv/128hd 🐢 CPU-only (slow)
Mistral Nemo 8kv/128hd ✅ Runs (tight)
Codestral 8kv/128hd 🐢 CPU-only (slow)
Llama 3.2 Vision 8kv/128hd ✅ Runs (tight)
Phi-4-mini 8kv/128hd ✅ Runs comfortably

…and 6 more — see the Mixtral 8x7B page.

Check any combo yourself: open the checker →