Running a 20B Video Diffusion Transformer on Consumer Hardware: A Deployment and Measurement Report for MiniMax H3 on Apple Silicon

We report the end-to-end deployment and measurement of MiniMax H3, a 20.38-billion-parameter video diffusion transformer (DiT), running entirely on consumer Apple Silicon hardware: an Apple Mac mini with M5 Pro chip and 64 GiB of unified memory. Using the official bf16-to-Q8 (8-bit, group size 64) quantization path executed locally on the machine, we produced a working text-to-video pipeline with no cloud dependency. A 15.08-second 576x1024 clip rendered in 4838.49 seconds with a measured MLX peak of 27.467 GiB. We further operated the system as an unattended production pipeline, completing 17 clips in 26.49 hours with zero render failures. A blind human review of the 17 production clips averaged 3.12, 3.18, and 2.94 out of 5 for structural integrity, temporal consistency, and visible artifacts.