bartowski/MiniMax-M3-GGUF overview

---

quantized_by: bartowski

pipeline_tag: image-text-to-text

license_link: LICENSE

tags:

• multimodal
• moe
• agent
• coding
• video

base_model_relation: quantized

license: other

license_name: minimax-community

base_model: MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3

---

Llamacpp imatrix Quantizations of MiniMax-M3 by MiniMaxAI

Using <a href="https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/">llama.cpp</a> release <a href="https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/releases/tag/b10141">b10141</a> for quantization.

Original model: https://huggingface.co/MiniMaxAI/MiniMax-M3

Model details:

• Parameter count: 427B
• Input support: text, image (with mmproj file) - details
• MTP: no
• imatrix: yes - details

How to run

Prompt format

]~!b[]~b]system
Your model version is MiniMax-M3, developed by MiniMax. Knowledge cutoff: January 2026. Founded in early 2022, MiniMax is a global AI foundation model company committed to advancing the frontiers of AI towards AGI.

<thinking_instructions>
You have a thinking capability that allows you to reason step by step before responding. When thinking is enabled, wrap your reasoning in <mm:think></mm:think> tags before your response. When thinking is disabled, begin your response directly after the </mm:think> prefix. When thinking is adaptive, decide on your own whether to think for the current turn.
Current thinking mode: adaptive. You are encouraged to think for complex decision-making, multi-step reasoning, or when analyzing function/tool results.
</thinking_instructions>[e~[
]~b]developer
{system_prompt}[e~[
]~b]user
{prompt}[e~[
]~b]ai

Don't know which to choose? Grab Q4_K_M (261.28GB) - usually a good mix of size and performance. Download instructions available here

Available files:

| Filename | Quant type | File Size | Split | Description |

| -------- | ---------- | --------- | ----- | ----------- |

| MiniMax-M3-Q8_0.gguf | Q8_0 | 453.61GB | true | Extremely high quality, generally unneeded but max available quant. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q6_K.gguf | Q6_K | 369.40GB | true | Very high quality, near perfect, recommended. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q5_K_M.gguf | Q5_K_M | 305.35GB | true | High quality, recommended. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q5_K_S.gguf | Q5_K_S | 295.23GB | true | High quality, recommended. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q4_1.gguf | Q4_1 | 268.89GB | true | Legacy format, similar performance to Q4_K_S but with improved tokens/watt on Apple silicon. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q4_K_M.gguf | Q4_K_M | 261.28GB | true | Good quality, default size for most use cases, recommended. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q4_K_S.gguf | Q4_K_S | 251.36GB | true | Slightly lower quality with more space savings, recommended. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q4_0.gguf | Q4_0 | 243.64GB | true | Legacy format, kept for compatibility with older tools. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ4_NL.gguf | IQ4_NL | 242.75GB | true | Similar to IQ4_XS, but slightly larger. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ4_XS.gguf | IQ4_XS | 229.69GB | true | Decent quality, smaller than Q4_K_S with similar performance, recommended. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q3_K_XL.gguf | Q3_K_XL | 206.05GB | true | Uses Q8_0 for embed and output weights. Lower quality but usable, good for low RAM availability. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ3_M.gguf | IQ3_M | 205.52GB | true | Medium-low quality, new method with decent performance comparable to Q3_K_M. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q3_K_L.gguf | Q3_K_L | 204.97GB | true | Lower quality but usable, good for low RAM availability. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q3_K_M.gguf | Q3_K_M | 196.61GB | true | Low quality. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ3_XS.gguf | IQ3_XS | 196.36GB | true | Lower quality, new method with decent performance, slightly better than Q3_K_S. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q3_K_S.gguf | Q3_K_S | 187.25GB | true | Low quality, not recommended. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ3_XXS.gguf | IQ3_XXS | 180.01GB | true | Lower quality, new method with decent performance, comparable to Q3 quants. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q2_K_L.gguf | Q2_K_L | 153.09GB | true | Uses Q8_0 for embed and output weights. Very low quality but surprisingly usable. |

| MiniMax-M3-Q2_K.gguf | Q2_K | 151.89GB | true | Very low quality but surprisingly usable. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ2_M.gguf | IQ2_M | 145.58GB | true | Relatively low quality, uses SOTA techniques to be surprisingly usable. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ2_S.gguf | IQ2_S | 132.14GB | true | Low quality, uses SOTA techniques to be usable. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ2_XS.gguf | IQ2_XS | 129.52GB | true | Low quality, uses SOTA techniques to be usable. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ2_XXS.gguf | IQ2_XXS | 116.61GB | true | Very low quality, uses SOTA techniques to be usable. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ1_M.gguf | IQ1_M | 100.74GB | true | Extremely low quality, not recommended. |

| MiniMax-M3-IQ1_S.gguf | IQ1_S | 90.53GB | true | Extremely low quality, not recommended. |

Downloading using the Hugging Face CLI

<details>

<summary>Click to view download instructions</summary>

First, make sure you have the Hugging Face CLI installed:

pip install -U "huggingface_hub[cli]"

The files marked true in the Split column above are stored as multiple parts in a folder. To download all the parts to a local folder, run:

hf download bartowski/MiniMax-M3-GGUF --include "MiniMax-M3-Q8_0/*" --local-dir ./

You can either specify a new local-dir (MiniMax-M3-Q8_0) or download them all in place (./)

</details>

How to run

These quants run with llama.cpp - installable in one line via llama.app:

curl -LsSf https://llama.app/install.sh | sh
llama-server -hf bartowski/MiniMax-M3-GGUF:Q4_K_M

llama-server includes a built-in chat web UI, served at http://localhost:8080 by default.

These quants were made with llama.cpp release b10141 - if this model's architecture is newly supported, you'll need that release or newer to run them.

They also work in: LM Studio · koboldcpp · ramalama · Jan AI · Text Generation Web UI · LoLLMs · Atomic Chat

Multimodal

This model supports multimodal input. Alongside the quants, this repo includes the multimodal projector files mmproj-MiniMax-M3-f16.gguf and mmproj-MiniMax-M3-bf16.gguf, which pair with any quant above.

llama.cpp downloads the mmproj automatically when using -hf as shown above; if you're loading files manually, pass it with --mmproj.

imatrix

All quants made using imatrix option with dataset from here. The imatrix is available here: MiniMax-M3-imatrix.gguf.

Embed/output weights

Some of these quants (Q3_K_XL, Q4_K_L etc) are the standard quantization method with the embeddings and output weights quantized to Q8_0 instead of what they would normally default to.

ARM/AVX information

llama.cpp automatically "repacks" weights into an interleaved layout at load time for faster inference on ARM and AVX machines - details in this PR. This once required downloading special Q4_0_4_4/4_8/8_8 files; those are long gone. Online repacking now covers Q4_0, IQ4_NL, and most K-quants, so no special quant choice is needed for CPU inference.

Which file should I choose?

<details>

<summary>Click here for details</summary>

An older (early 2024) but still useful write-up with charts comparing quant performances is provided by Artefact2 here

The first thing to figure out is how big a model you can run. To do this, you'll need to figure out how much RAM and/or VRAM you have.

If you want your model running as FAST as possible, you'll want to fit the whole thing on your GPU's VRAM. Aim for a quant with a file size 1-2GB smaller than your GPU's total VRAM.

If you want the absolute maximum quality, add both your system RAM and your GPU's VRAM together, then similarly grab a quant with a file size 1-2GB Smaller than that total.

Hugging Face can also do this math for you: add your hardware in your Local Apps settings and the model page will show which files fit.

Next, you'll need to decide if you want to use an 'I-quant' or a 'K-quant'.

If you don't want to think too much, grab one of the K-quants. These are in format 'QX_K_X', like Q5_K_M.

If you want to get more into the weeds, you can check out this extremely useful feature chart:

llama.cpp feature matrix

But basically, if you're aiming for below Q4, and you're running cuBLAS (Nvidia) or rocBLAS (AMD), you should look towards the I-quants. These are in format IQX_X, like IQ3_M. These are newer and offer better performance for their size.

These I-quants can also be used on CPU, but will be slower than their K-quant equivalent, so speed vs performance is a tradeoff you'll have to decide.

</details>

Credits

Thank you kalomaze and Dampf for assistance in creating the imatrix calibration dataset.

Thank you ZeroWw for the inspiration to experiment with embed/output.

Want to support my work? Visit my ko-fi page here: https://ko-fi.com/bartowski