What you need to run Qwen 3.5 35B A3B

About Qwen 3.5 35B A3B

Qwen 3.5 35B A3B is a general chat model from Alibaba. Very fast for its size. Great general assistant. Running it locally needs about 23.6 GB of memory, and the download is 22 GB. It is a mixture of experts model: only about 1.9 GB of its weights are read for each word, so it generates much faster than a dense model of the same size, but all 22 GB still has to fit in memory.

Smallest Mac that runs it

The least memory you need, by Apple chip:

• M1: does not fit
• M1 Pro: from 32 GB
• M1 Max: from 32 GB
• M1 Ultra: from 64 GB
• M2: does not fit
• M2 Pro: from 32 GB
• M2 Max: from 32 GB
• M2 Ultra: from 64 GB
• M3: does not fit
• M3 Pro: from 36 GB
• M3 Max: from 36 GB
• M3 Ultra: from 96 GB
• M4: from 32 GB
• M4 Pro: from 48 GB
• M4 Max: from 36 GB
• M5: from 32 GB
• M5 Pro: from 48 GB
• M5 Max: from 36 GB

Graphics cards

Runs well on: RTX 5090. Runs slowly with help from system RAM on: RTX 3060 12GB, RTX 3070, RTX 3080 10GB, RTX 3090, RTX 4060, RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, RTX 4070 / 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, RTX 4080 / 4080 Super, RTX 4090, RTX 5060, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, Radeon RX 7800 XT, Radeon RX 9070 XT, Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

Hardware to run it

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• Smallest Mac: M5 with 32 GB. See it on Amazon
• Smallest graphics card: RTX 5090 (32 GB). See it on Amazon
• Storage: this model is a 22 GB download, and most people end up keeping several. A fast external SSD keeps your main drive free. See SSDs on Amazon

Lighter and heavier alternatives

• Gemma 4 26B A4B: needs about 19.4 GB, a lighter choice. Mixture of experts: big-model quality at small-model speed.
• Gemma 4 31B: needs about 21.5 GB, a lighter choice. One of the best models that fits a 24 GB GPU or 32 GB Mac.
• Llama 3.3 70B: needs about 45.6 GB, a heavier choice. Older but solid large model. Needs serious memory.
• gpt-oss 120B: needs about 68.8 GB, a heavier choice. OpenAI's big open model. Fast for its size on high-memory machines.

Questions