I strongly recommend trying LM Studio - it's the lowest friction way to try out models, you can browse https://lmstudio.ai/models and click "Get" and then "Run in LM Studio" to download and run a model.

With 96GB I'd start with the Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.6 models. Any of those should work fine.

I think currently you can only get the M3 Ultra Studio with 96gb, and for coding tasks, say you rub Qwen Coder on it (which doesn't need that much ram), it's not the fastest, something like 30-40 tok/sec. Probably better with a MacBook Pro with the M5 chip. There is a website for comparing different configurations and models: https://llmcheck.net/benchmarks

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