Outlier Plus on Mac Studio M3 Ultra: runs by streaming experts from the SSD on the 96 GB base model (the 209 GB of weights fit fully in memory only on a 256 GB Mac). Minimum unified memory required: 64 GB. Disk size: 209 GB. Default context window: 32K tokens. Plus streams experts from the SSD, so it is limited by SSD reads rather than by the 819 GB/s memory bus, and a bandwidth ratio does not apply. We measured 1.59 tok/s on an M1 Ultra only and have no figure for the Mac Studio M3 Ultra.
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The pairing under examination is Outlier Plus (209 GB MLX 4-bit, Qwen3.5-397B-A17B base, 32K default context, 64 GB unified memory minimum) on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra (Apple M3 Ultra, 28-32 CPU cores, 60-80 GPU cores, 96, 256 or 512 GB unified memory, 819 GB/s, 2025). Outlier loads this tier through its paged-expert engine inside the bundled FastAPI sidecar. Plus decodes by streaming experts from the SSD, so its speed is set by SSD reads and not by this Mac’s 819 GB/s memory bus.
The Mac Studio M3 Ultra is a desktop with active cooling, which is the configuration that comes closest to holding the figure above through a long unattended run. There is no battery to trade against and no lap to keep cool, so the limit on Outlier Plus here is SSD read speed rather than the thermal envelope. This is the shape of machine to pick if the job runs unattended.
The tier catalog lists a peak generation footprint of about 14.04 GB for Outlier Plus, for a short chat; a long agent session needs more. The rule of thumb is to leave roughly 4 GB for the OS and one open browser tab, so across the Mac Studio M3 Ultra memory options that leaves 96 GB → 78.0 GB free; 256 GB → 238.0 GB free; 512 GB → 494.0 GB free. Plus streams experts from the SSD, so it is limited by SSD reads rather than by the 819 GB/s memory bus, and a bandwidth ratio does not apply. We measured 1.59 tok/s on an M1 Ultra only and have no figure for the Mac Studio M3 Ultra.
The 2025 Mac Studio M3 Ultra ships with 96, 256 or 512 GB of unified memory. Headroom over the 64 GB Outlier Plus minimum is 32 GB on the 96 GB base model. Step-by-step install instructions live on the install guide; the part that varies for this Apple M3 Ultra machine is that the 209 GB pull from mlx-community/Qwen3.5-397B-A17B-4bit over HTTPS lands in ~/Library/Application Support/Outlier/models/plus/ and download time is bandwidth-limited by the network, not by the 28-32-core Apple M3 Ultra CPU.
The Outlier Plus tier defaults to 32K context and caps at 128K on Pro. KV cache scales linearly with context length on dense models, so longer contexts trade headroom for capacity. On a 96 GB Mac Studio M3 Ultra, the default context is the safe starting point.
209 GB on disk against the 96 GB Mac Studio M3 Ultra (the smallest configuration that meets the 64 GB minimum) means the weights are about 2.2× its memory, which is why Outlier Plus streams from the SSD instead of holding everything in memory.
For lighter-weight work on this Apple M3 Ultra, the Core tier is the next step down and runs visibly faster. The unified-memory explainer works out why this tier streams from the SSD.
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