Evaluation models that run on 256 GB
19 models with published weights that fit in 256 GB — a Mac Studio with 256. Counted at four-bit quantisation, weights only, leaving the machine about a third of its memory and a gigabyte for context: room for roughly 274 billion parameters. A mixture of experts is counted in full, because it is held in full even though only a few experts compute.
A Mac Studio at the top of its configuration, or a serious machine. Almost everything openly published fits, including the large mixtures of experts. At this point the constraint is no longer whether the model loads but whether it generates fast enough to be worth waiting for.
Tools for judging what a model produced: scoring runs, tracing a chain of calls, catching a regression before a user does. Priced per trace or per evaluation. Most use a model as the judge, which is worth knowing, because it means your evaluation has a bill and an opinion of its own.
- DeepSeek-Coder-V2-InstructDeepSeek236B≈153.2 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- GPT OSS Safeguard 120BOpenAI120B≈78.0 GB at 4-bit3 also selling it hosted
- Qwable-v1lordx6436.0B≈23.4 GB at 4-bit
- Olmo 3 32B ThinkAllen Institute for AI (Ai2)32.2B≈21.0 GB at 4-bit
- Qwen3 30B A3B Thinking 2507Alibaba30.5B≈19.8 GB at 4-bit4 also selling it hosted
- DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite-InstructDeepSeek15.7B≈10.2 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- Llama Guard 3 11B VisionMeta11.0B≈7.2 GB at 4-bit2 also selling it hosted
- Qwythos-9B-Claude-Mythos-5-1Mempero-ai9.4B≈6.1 GB at 4-bit
- Nemotron Nano 9B V2NVIDIA9.0B≈5.9 GB at 4-bit5 also selling it hosted
- Aion-RP 1.0 (8B)AionLabs8.0B≈5.2 GB at 4-bit2 also selling it hosted
- DeepSeek R1 0528 Qwen3 8BDeepSeek8.0B≈5.2 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8BDeepSeek8.0B≈5.2 GB at 4-bit3 also selling it hosted
- Qwen2.5-Omni-3BAlibaba5.5B≈3.6 GB at 4-bit
- fable-tracesAliesTaha4.0B≈2.6 GB at 4-bit
- LocoOperator-4BLocoreMind4.0B≈2.6 GB at 4-bit
- Isaac 0.2 2B PreviewPerceptron2.0B≈1.3 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- Isaac 0.2 1BPerceptron1.0B≈0.7 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- llama-nemotron-rerank-vl-1b-v2NVIDIA1.0B≈0.7 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted
- PaddleOCR-VL-0.9Bpaddlepaddle0.9B≈0.6 GB at 4-bit1 also selling it hosted