I love running two models locally: qwen3.6 27B 8bit (dense) and qwen3.6 35B 4bit (MoE).

The 27B is the smarter, more reliable one - but it is slower. The 35B is faster, still very smart but below 27B, a bit less reliable. The reason is the MoE - Mixture of Experts architecture, which only activates a subset of parameters, making the model much much faster.

I run the 27B on a MacBook Pro M5 Max + 40 GPU cores + 128GB RAM (well, on this beast I can have 27B + 35B in memory at the same time with headroom for all the other stuff). But because this is a laptop, it is not possible to run local LLMs all the time - it just gets too hot and too loud.

What excites me more: I run the 35B model on a MacMini M4 with 64GB RAM. It is fast, it gets a lot of work done (e.g. it scans, extracts and classifies my emails, it watches the mailbox all the time and does work). I also use it as my private Hermes assistant ("when is the next Starship launch?", "who is playing today at the World Cup? Give me some trivia").

Next step I am planning is a RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell workstation I can put in my basement. I want to run qwen really fast, with multiple threads / prompts / agents at once. And MAYBE if the budget allows, a 2x RTX Pro 6000 setup in order to run DeepSeek v4 flash on it (to run research on it).