Memory needed per file on 24/32 GB cards (file sizes + KV estimate)

#3
by localllmrig - opened

Fit table from the three file sizes, mainly for 24 GB card owners deciding between the three targets.
Need β‰ˆ file + KV cache + ~0.8 GB runtime (our estimate). KV stays small because only 16 of the 64 layers in Qwen3.8-27B's config are full attention (the other 48 are linear attention): about 64 KB per token at fp16, so 0.54 GB at 8K and 2.15 GB at 32K.

File Size Need @8K Need @32K 24 GB card 32 GB card
EAR98 (Q5_K_S) 18.88 GB ~20.2 GB ~21.8 GB βœ“ up to ~56K ctx βœ“
EAR98.5 (Q5_K_M) 20.70 GB ~22.0 GB ~23.7 GB βœ“ up to ~29K ctx βœ“
EAR99 (Q6_K) 23.70 GB ~25.0 GB ~26.6 GB βœ— βœ“ up to ~105K ctx

(24 GB counted as ~23.4 GB usable, fp16 KV; a q8_0 KV cache roughly doubles those context limits.)

So on a 3090/4090, EAR98.5 is the highest-fidelity file that fits, as long as you stay under ~29K context; EAR99 needs a 32 GB card or a Mac with 36 GB+. Corrections welcome.
Full table: https://localllmrig.com/can-i-run/qwen3.8-27b?utm_source=huggingface&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=qwen3-8-27b-slq

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