NVIDIA Nemotron Cascade 2 30B-A3B
NVIDIA Nemotron Cascade 2 30B-A3B loads in 24 GB at Q6_K and is comfortable from 48 GB of memory, Macs included from the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB. Below: the full memory math, the cheapest card that runs it well, and the fastest machine we track.
Memory math
KV = fp16 estimate (q8_0 cache roughly halves it). "Comfortable" = weights + KV within the engine's tiered budget (~70-85% of memory).
Hardware snapshot
More Nemotron models
Frequently asked questions
How much memory does NVIDIA Nemotron Cascade 2 30B-A3B need?
24 GB for the Q6_K weights, plus ~4.0 GB of KV-cache at 16k context — about 28.0 GB total. Comfortable from 48 GB of VRAM or unified memory.
Does NVIDIA Nemotron Cascade 2 30B-A3B run on a Mac?
Yes — from the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB (~30 tok/s est.). Unified memory means the RAM budget is the only limit.
What is the cheapest GPU for NVIDIA Nemotron Cascade 2 30B-A3B?
The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo) is the cheapest tracked card that runs NVIDIA Nemotron Cascade 2 30B-A3B comfortably — ~19 tok/s est. at ~$3,847 used (as of 2026-07-31).
Cite this page
ModelFit: NVIDIA Nemotron Cascade 2 30B-A3B — specs, memory math and hardware verdicts. https://modelfit.io/models/nemotron-cascade-2-30b-a3b/ (dataset updated 2026-09-03, CC BY 4.0).