It all depends on what you want to do, I guess.

If you're seeking the kind of hands-off claude experience, obviously not. They are slow.

If you want to learn how these things work, train them locally, tinker, play with the code, grasp the fundamentals, or just out of sheer bloody-mindedness and principle refuse to tether the functioning of your application to a cloud API...

I have the same processor and ram. The dense 30b ish Gemma/Qwen really don't break 10 TPS with or without MTP. MOE's in this range feel more usable if they are smart enough for your work. Probably would still use hosted versions of these over local unless. MOE's feel somewhere between sonnet 3.5 and 3.7 to me. Dense feels between sonnet 3.7 and 4 in basic coding or local agentic capabilities (not close to those in chat or world knowledge)

From an economical point of view, there's almost no point to using these locally running models. The only things they are good for would be dirt cheap using the smaller/older models via some API as well. Recovering the investment for the hundreds/thousands you spend extra on hardware easily funds a lot of that. Unless you are using this stuff at scale, it's probably not going to be worth it.

I've dabbled with Qwen 3.x and Gemma 4 models a bit. They are alright but not that impressive. And my mac gets super hot if I use them for extended periods of time. It's just not very nice to use locally.

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