Hardware Benchmarks

Best Local LLM Performance for Apple M3

Compare Apple M3 benchmark results and see which models actually earn the best completed quality scores.

ShareRedditX

Hardware Overview

GPU-specific specifications for local LLM planning.

Apple M3
VRAM
16GB

Recommended Models

Models we recommend for Apple M3.

Fastest

qwen3.5:0.8b-mlx

852.88M

223.0 tok/s

Highest token generation speed at 223.0 tok/s.

Best quality

gpt-oss:20b

20.9B

8.4 tok/sQuality 71.2

Highest completed quality score at 71.2.

Largest context

qwen3:8b-q4_K_M

8.2B

12.6 tok/sContext 8,192 tokens

Largest context that fits in 16GB VRAM, at 8,192 tokens.

Benchmark Results

Completed quality-ranked benchmark results for Apple M3.