How fast will DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B feel on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB?

DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB

DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B is a 14.77B-parameter model. At Q4_K_M it needs about 9.7 GB of memory. The MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB has 96 GB usable, so it fits entirely in memory. Expect about 37 tokens/sec (33–41), with the first token after 0.4 s for a short prompt. This estimate is based on community benchmarks of this exact setup.

Speed by quantization

QuantizationFile sizeMemoryGenerationFirst tokenSource
Q4_K_M9.0 GBFits37 tok/s0.4 sMeasured
Q8_015.7 GBFits20 tok/s0.4 sDerived
FP1629.6 GBFits11 tok/s0.4 sDerived

DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B on other hardware

Other models on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB

All models on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B on all hardware

Estimates for a short prompt on a single device. Measured numbers come from community benchmarks (r/LocalLLaMA, localscore.ai and more); others are derived from similar setups or projected from specs. Open source on GitHub.