Cheapest Mac to run DeepSeek-V3 / R1
671B parameters (37B active) · quality index 37 · coding 49 · every Apple Silicon Mac ever sold, compared. It is a mixture-of-experts model: all 671B parameters must sit in memory, but only 37B compute per token, which is why it is faster than dense models of similar size.
DeepSeek-V3 / R1 only just fits a single Mac: a used Mac Studio M3 Ultra 32c/80c 512GB (2025) (~$7,457 EST.) can hold it at Q3_K_M — last-resort quantization quality — at roughly 24 tok/s. For Q4-or-better quality it needs ≈436GB resident: a multi-machine cluster, or a cloud API at about $2.5/1M output tokens.
Run it
ollama run deepseek-r1:671b pulls the default (≈Q4) build once you have Ollama installed.
Or skip the hardware
Cloud APIs serve DeepSeek-V3 / R1 at about $2.5 per million output tokens. The main site's break-even solver computes the daily usage where owning a Mac becomes cheaper than renting.
Open the interactive guide — speed simulator, TCO, all 75 machines →