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MiniMaxAI / minimax_m3_vl

MiniMax-M3

427.0 billion parameters, routing 4 of 128 experts per token.

Open in the calculator →

Architecturepublished data
Quick answer
MiniMax-M3 needs about 264.0 GB at Q4_K_M — the format most people download — with 8,192 tokens of context. None of the 18 common devices listed below holds it entirely at this setting. No hardware for it? Rent a GPU that runs it, priced live.

Sized at 8,192 tokens of context with the whole model in device memory, across 18 common devices. Speeds are estimates, not benchmarks.

Weight-file size by format

FormatSizeRangeBasis
FP16854.5 GB597.9 GB – 862.6 GBsize range
Q8_0454.1 GB317.6 GB – 460.6 GBsize range
Q6_K350.7 GB245.2 GB – 356.7 GBsize range
Q5_K_M305.1 GB205.5 GB – 356.7 GBsize range
Q5_0298.0 GB205.5 GB – 356.7 GBsize range
Q4_K_M262.1 GB168.1 GB – 356.7 GBsize range
Q4_0248.5 GB168.1 GB – 356.7 GBsize range
Q3_K_M213.6 GB128.4 GB – 356.7 GBsize range
Q2_K169.1 GB98.1 GB – 356.7 GBsize range

A file size is not the memory a run needs: the KV cache and the runtime reserve come on top, and the calculator adds both.

What the labels mean
published data
Read from a published source — a file's byte count, a model's configuration or a manufacturer's specification — or exact arithmetic on such values. Not a measurement on a machine.
reconstructed size
Weight size reconstructed from the pinned architecture, because no published file exists.
size range
Only a lower and an upper bound are claimed for this weight size.

Hardware ladder

Q4_K_M at 8,192 tokens · 0 of 18 devices hold it entirely
DeviceMemoryVerdictDecodeCalculator
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070264.0 GB of 12 GB58 layers on system RAM~4.1 tok/s with offloadOpen →
AMD Radeon™ RX 9070 XT264.0 GB of 16 GB57 layers on system RAM~4.1 tok/s with offloadOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080264.0 GB of 16 GB57 layers on system RAM~4.1 tok/s with offloadOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080264.0 GB of 16 GB57 layers on system RAM~4.1 tok/s with offloadOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti264.0 GB of 16 GB57 layers on system RAM~4.1 tok/s with offloadOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB264.0 GB of 16 GB57 layers on system RAM~4.1 tok/s with offloadOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090264.0 GB of 24 GB55 layers on system RAM~4.3 tok/s with offloadOpen →
AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 XTX264.0 GB of 24 GB55 layers on system RAM~4.3 tok/s with offloadOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090264.0 GB of 24 GB55 layers on system RAM~4.3 tok/s with offloadOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090264.0 GB of 32 GB54 layers on system RAM~4.4 tok/s with offloadOpen →
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation264.0 GB of 48 GB50 layers on system RAM~4.6 tok/s with offloadOpen →
Apple M4 Pro264.0 GB of 64 GBdoes not fitnot calibratedOpen →
Apple M5 Pro264.0 GB of 64 GBdoes not fitnot calibratedOpen →
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with Radeon 8060S264.0 GB of 128 GBdoes not fitnot calibratedOpen →
Apple M3 Max264.0 GB of 128 GBdoes not fitnot calibratedOpen →
Apple M4 Max264.0 GB of 128 GBdoes not fitnot calibratedOpen →
NVIDIA DGX Spark264.0 GB of 128 GBdoes not fitnot calibratedOpen →
Apple M2 Ultra264.0 GB of 192 GBdoes not fitnot calibratedOpen →

Decode is a calibrated estimate from the published calibration; capacity is the manufacturer's published ceiling, not guaranteed free memory. Fitting in memory is not the same as loading: whether the runtime and version you have supports this architecture and format on that machine has not been tested here. Offloaded rows assume there is enough system RAM for the overflow — the calculator checks that against the RAM you declare. Each “Open” link keeps this model, format and context.

Run it in the cloud

Rent a GPU that runs MiniMax-M3

Every rentable machine that holds the whole model, from Vast.ai and RunPod, with this site's speed estimate for each and the provider's own price, read live. Cheapest first; sort by cost per token or speed instead, or switch the format.

Prices · 18:30 UTC, 22 Sept
7 configurations in stock · 8 out of stock
MachineSpeedPer hourPer M tokensWhereRent
8× L40S384 GBrecommendedcheapestbest value~274 tok/sFaster than you read$3.73$3.79Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.9% reliableRent on Vast.ai
8× RTX PRO 5000384 GB~426 tok/sFaster than you read$6.81$4.44Vast.aiMarketplace · 98.3% reliableRent on Vast.ai
2× H200 NVL282 GB~404 tok/sFaster than you read$7.20$4.95Vast.aiMarketplace · 98.7% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× B300270 GB~324 tok/sFaster than you read$7.89$6.76RunPodSecure CloudRent on RunPod
4× H100 SXM320 GBfastest~564 tok/sFaster than you read$9.07$4.46Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.9% reliableRunPod $13.96/h Rent on Vast.ai
2× H200282 GB~404 tok/sFaster than you read$9.18$6.31RunPodSecure CloudVast.ai $10.00/h Rent on RunPod
4× H100 PCIe320 GB~337 tok/sFaster than you read$9.59$7.90Vast.aiMarketplace · 98.3% reliableRent on Vast.ai
No GPU at all

Use MiniMax-M3 by the token

For one person chatting, that is about 3.2× cheaper than the best-value rented card above ($3.79 per million tokens). A rented GPU pays off when you keep it busy — many requests batched together, long agent runs — or when the data must stay on a machine you control, or the exact file you want is not served anywhere.

First time renting a GPU? How it works, in four steps
  1. Create an account and add credit. Both providers are prepaid: $10 is enough to try any card on this page for hours. A new RunPod account that arrives through a referral link gets a one-time $5 credit when it first adds $10.
  2. Pick the card and the count shown here, and a template: llama.cpp or vLLM for an OpenAI-compatible API, or one with a web chat if you only want to talk to the model. “How to launch it” below gives the exact image and command.
  3. Wait for the download. The weights are fetched on the machine; tens of gigabytes take a few minutes on a data-centre connection. You pay by the second from the moment it starts.
  4. Stop it when you are done. A running machine bills even when idle. A stopped one costs nothing per hour, though its disk is usually still billed until you delete it.
How to launch it

No Q4_K_M file of MiniMax-M3 is catalogued here, so there is no exact command to vouch for. Start the machine from the llama.cpp server image ghcr.io/ggml-org/llama.cpp:server-cuda and point -hf at a Q4_K_M build from the publisher or a quantizer you trust — search Hugging Face for one. Check its file size against the memory figure on this page before you rent.

Every machine holds the whole model at Q4_K_M and 8,192 tokens of context, no offload. Speeds are this site’s single-stream decode estimates; prices are what each provider’s own API quoted, on-demand, for the whole machine. Vast hosts below 98% measured reliability are left out.

Referral links Vast.ai, RunPod and Novita pay us a share of what you spend if you sign up through these buttons. It costs you nothing, and it never decides an order or a recommendation: both are computed from the live price and the speed, and options that pay us nothing are listed and recommended on the same terms. How we rank

Buying a card instead, or paying by the token? Compare a year of MiniMax-M3 three ways →

Under the hood

Architecture, read from the publisher’s file

The numbers every figure above is computed from, with the file they came from.

Architecture

✓ Architecture read from the published config.json

Retrieved 2026-09-01 at pinned commit f0e1c1e04d40; parameter count from the safetensors index at the same revision.

Architecture
minimax_m3_vl
Layers
60
Hidden size
6,144
Attention heads
64
KV heads
4
Head dimension
128
Feed-forward width
3,072
Vocabulary
200,064
Context ceiling
1,048,576
RoPE theta
5,000,000
Experts
128
Experts / token
4
Shared experts
1
Shared expert width
3,072

Where the memory goes

tokenembedding× 60 decoder blocksGrouped-query attention64 query · 4 KV headsfull contextRouted experts4 of 128 per tokenall residentoutputprojectiongrows with contextcapacity ≠ traffic

Grouped-query attention shares each key/value head across 16 query heads, so the KV cache is 6% of what multi-head attention would need at the same context.

This is a multimodal checkpoint (vision); the diagram and memory sizing above cover the text decoder. Encoder/audio/image activations are not included in the KV or weight figures.

Open the exact official config.json ↗

More from MiniMaxAI

MiniMax-M2MiniMax-M2.1MiniMax-M2.5MiniMax-M2.7MiniMax-Text-01

Use this answer in your own product

As JSON, from the API
curl -s https://llmbottleneck.com/v1/analyze \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LLMB_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"minimaxai-minimax-m3","quantization":"Q4_K_M","context":8192,"hardware":"nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090"}'

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On your page, as a widget
<script src="https://llmbottleneck.com/widget.js"
  data-model="minimaxai-minimax-m3" data-quantization="Q4_K_M"
  data-hardware="nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090" data-context="8192"></script>

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Citing this page

LLM Bottleneck. “MiniMax-M3 VRAM and hardware requirements.” Architecture from MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3 at revision f0e1c1e04d40, retrieved 2026-09-01. https://llmbottleneck.com/models/minimaxai-minimax-m3

Every figure above is either the published value or a reconstruction whose measured error is on the accuracy page.

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catalogue 2026-10-03models 327devices 135