MiniMax M3 on Lenovo ThinkStation PX (4x RTX PRO 6000, 384 GB)

427.04B (23B active) on 384 GB at 7,168 GB/s. Hardware details · Model details

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Yes. MiniMax M3 fits on Lenovo ThinkStation PX (4x RTX PRO 6000, 384 GB) at the recommended Q4_K_M configuration, requiring approximately 258.9 GB at 8K context. Practical context capacity is 512K. Expected decode for the recommended configuration is ~109–157 t/s. Estimated
CompatibilityComfortable
Calculated fit
Yes
Calculated Uses under 80% of usable memory. Room for a long context and other work.
Recommended quantization
Q4_K_M
Calculated gguf
Memory required
258.9 GB
Calculated of 337.9 GB usable — 77%
Max practical context
512K
Calculated model supports 1M

Memory budget at 8K context

Model weights ⓘ
248.3 GB Calculated
KV cache ⓘ
0.9 GB Calculated
Runtime overhead ⓘ
9.7 GB Estimated
Total required
258.9 GB Calculated
Headroom ⓘ
79.0 GB Calculated
Highest-precision quantization that leaves headroom: uses 77% of usable memory at 8K context.
4 GPUs providing 384 GB aggregate VRAM. Assumes tensor- or layer-parallel sharding; each GPU carries its own context and communication buffers. Interconnect: PCIe 5.0 x16.
Mixture of experts: all 427.04B parameters must be resident in memory even though only ~23B are active per token. Memory follows total parameters; speed follows active parameters.
Multi-GPU throughput depends heavily on interconnect. Without NVLink or NVSwitch, tensor parallelism over PCIe adds latency that partially offsets the extra bandwidth.
Performance

Estimated performance · recommended Q4_K_M

Decode, prefill and TTFT below are estimates for Q4_K_M. We do not have a comparable Q4_K_M measurement on this machine.

Estimated decode
~109–157 t/s
Estimated Q4_K_M; calculated range
Estimated prefill
~1300–2690 t/s
Estimated Q4_K_M; calculated range
Estimated TTFT at 8K
~3.1–6.4 s
Estimated Q4_K_M; calculated range
Hardware load reference
1580 W
Measured machine-level load; not this model run
How the estimate is calculated
  1. Multi-GPU: 1792 GB/s per card, with each additional card contributing 40% of its bandwidth — 3942 GB/s effective, not the 7168 GB/s aggregate. Cross-GPU collectives use PCIe rather than a dedicated GPU fabric.
  2. Decode: reading 23.0B active parameters at 4.85 bits/weight takes 5.20 ms at 3942 GB/s x 68% achieved efficiency.
  3. MoE routing penalty of 15% applied: expert gathers are less bandwidth-efficient than a dense sweep.
  4. Prefill: 760 TFLOPS (FP16) x 2 for native FP8 tensor cores x 26% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 99.1B parameters per token.
  5. Prefill uses 99.1B effective parameters, not the 23B active in decode: a batch of hundreds of tokens routes across most of the expert pool.

  • MoE decode depends on how well the engine batches expert gathers; real results vary more than for dense models.
  • Prefill throughput is highly engine-dependent. Flash attention, batch size and quantized KV all move this number substantially, and for sparse mixture-of-experts models it is the least reliable figure we produce.
  • This is a calculated estimate, not a measurement. It assumes a single request, a short prompt, no speculative decoding and a warm model already resident in memory.

Estimator version estimator_v1. Stored with every estimated row so old estimates can be regenerated when the model improves.

Submit a benchmarkSubmissions stay pending until reviewed.
This model at other quantizations on this machine
QuantizationResidentDiskTotal neededUtilisationFitMax context
Q4_K_Mrecommended248.3 GB248.3 GB258.9 GB77%Comfortable512K
Q5_K_M291.4 GB291.4 GB303.2 GB90%Fits192K
Q8_0431.0 GB431.0 GB447.1 GB132%Does not fit0
Cost of running MiniMax M3 on this machineUnited States (federal) · C corporation · 8h/day
Monthly economic cost
$746
Calculated after tax
Codex/Claude Code
$100/mo
≈ $100/mo · local is $646 more
Net cash at purchase
$58,553
Calculated VAT not reclaimable
Total over 5 years
$44,773
Calculated after tax, after resale
Cost per USD/1M tokens
$44.28
Calculated 16.9M tokens/month

The $100 comparison uses the Codex Pro 5x / Claude Max 5x plans. A fixed planning conversion is used for USD. This compares monthly spend only: subscriptions have usage limits, local hardware has different capabilities and constraints, and taxes or regional pricing may change the charged amount. Prices checked 7 September 2026.

Purchase-price input: $58,553 in United States (federal), tax/VAT excluded · estimated · Lenovo enterprise channel (converted catalogue estimate). This is the localized purchase input; the after-tax economic cost is calculated separately below.

Monthly breakdown

Depreciation
49,770 over 5 years, straight-line to a 8,783 residual
$829.50
Electricity
85.2 kWh/month at 0.140/kWh
$11.93
Cost of capital
4.0%/yr on 33,668 average capital employed
$112.23
Monthly cost before tax$953.65
Electricity tax shield
Running costs are deductible business expenses
−$2.50
First-year expensing
§179 (100.0%)
−$204.93
Monthly economic cost after tax$746.21

Three different numbers, deliberately

Cash cost
$58,553
Money that leaves the bank account on day one, net of reclaimable VAT.
Accounting depreciation
$829.50/month
$49,770 written down over 5 years to a $8,783 residual.
After-tax economic cost
$746.21/month
Depreciation plus running costs plus cost of capital, less the tax those deductions save. This is the figure to compare between machines.
Assumptions and sources (verified 2026-09-07)
VAT rate
0% Official spec
VAT recoverable
0% Official spec
Federal C-corporation estimate at the flat 21% rate. Pass-through entities should use the sole-proprietor estimate as a rougher proxy.
Effective deduction rate
21.00% Calculated
Headline marginal rate 21.00%.
Depreciation
5 years, straight-line Assumption
Residual value
$8,783 (15%) Assumption
Two GPU generations later, the card is worth a fraction of its list price.
Electricity
$0.140/kWh Assumption
Average power draw
484 W Calculated
Load 1580 W for 20% of powered hours, idle 210 W for the rest — a machine that is on is not generating tokens the whole time.
Investment allowances
§179 100.0% Official spec
Worth $12,296 in total — first-year expensing that replaces later tax depreciation.
Cost of capital
$112.23/month Assumption
Assumes the machine generates tokens 20% of its 176 powered hours per month. Cost per token scales inversely with this number — halve the utilisation and the cost per token doubles.
Federal planning estimate only, not tax advice. State and local income tax, sales/use tax and incentives are excluded. It assumes 100% business use, a Section 179 election, enough business income to use it, and that the full annual limit remains available.
Efficiency metrics
Decode per $1,000 spent
2.3 t/s
Calculated purchase price only
Decode per $100/month
17.8 t/s
Calculated after-tax ownership cost
Tokens per joule
0.27
Calculated same as tokens/s per watt
USD per 1M output tokens
$44.28
Calculated at 20% utilisation
Local versus hosted APIs
Hosted modelUSD/1M outputBreak-evenAPI at your volumeVerdictComparison type
Qwen3.8 Flash
Alibaba Cloud
$0.42484.6M/mo$26API cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash
DeepSeek
$0.60414.6M/mo$30API cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek-V4 Pro
DeepSeek
$1.98102.8M/mo$122API cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek V4 Pro (Together)
Together AI
$4.4035.2M/mo$357API cheaperDifferent model
GLM-5.3
Z.ai
$4.4047.8M/mo$263API cheaperDifferent model
Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic
$5.0057.4M/mo$219API cheaperDifferent model
Different-model comparison: the hosted model is not the model you would run locally. Treat this as a workload-quality trade-off, not a direct economic equivalence — the frontier model may complete a task in fewer tokens, or complete tasks the local model cannot. Break-even is the monthly output volume at which API spend equals the $746/month economic cost of owning this machine, assuming 8 input tokens per output token. Hosted prices are published in USD. This table is the canonical US default.