Can I run DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B on a Mac with 48 GB?

Yes, just

Its published weights (29.5 GB) fit in the 36.0 GB a Mac with 48 GB can use, with room for ≈ 32K tokens of context.

Full analysis of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B Everything that runs on Mac with 48 GB Get the weights on Hugging Face

hf download deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B

Files and context on Mac with 48 GB

Each file of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B (and of GGUF versions the site has analyzed), and how much context fits next to it, with the context cache in 16-bit or 8-bit.

File	Size	On Mac with 48 GB	Context (16-bit)	Context (8-bit)
As published	29.5 GB	Tight	32K	64K
4-bit (estimate)	8.31 GB	Fits	128K	128K

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B on other hardware

NVIDIA H100Yes
RTX 5090Probably, at 4-bit
RTX 4090Probably, at 4-bit
RTX 3090Probably, at 4-bit
RTX 5060 Ti 16 GBProbably, at 4-bit
RTX 3060 12 GBProbably, at 4-bit
RTX 4060No
Mac with 32 GBProbably, at 4-bit
Mac with 48 GBYes, just
Mac with 64 GBYes
Mac with 128 GBYes

Popular models that run on Mac with 48 GB

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Qwen3-8BQwen · 8.19B
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUFunsloth · 30.5B
Qwen2.5-7B-InstructQwen · 7.62B
Qwen3.5-9BQwen · 9.65B
Qwen2.5-0.5B-InstructQwen · 494M

Assumes 75% of the Mac's memory is usable (macOS's default limit for the GPU; it can be raised) and at least 4K tokens of context for one conversation, with the context cache in 16-bit unless noted. Fits leaves at least 20% of that memory for context; Tight leaves less.