Can I run Qwen3.8 27B locally?
Qwen3.8 27B has 27.78 billion parameters (Hugging Face). At the popular Q4_K_M quantization it needs roughly 18.6 GB of GPU memory ESTIMATE. It has been on Hugging Face since 2026-08-05.
Memory needed by quantization
| Quant | Weights | Total needed (est.) |
|---|---|---|
| IQ1_S | 5.4 GB | 6.6 GB |
| IQ2_XXS | 7.2 GB | 8.4 GB |
| IQ2_M | 9.4 GB | 10.7 GB |
| Q2_K | 11.0 GB | 12.4 GB |
| IQ3_XXS | 10.6 GB | 12.0 GB |
| Q3_K_S | 12.7 GB | 14.2 GB |
| IQ3_M | 12.7 GB | 14.2 GB |
| Q3_K_M | 13.9 GB | 15.5 GB |
| IQ4_XS | 14.8 GB | 16.4 GB |
| Q4_0 | 15.6 GB | 17.3 GB |
| Q4_K_M | 16.8 GB | 18.6 GB |
| MXFP4 | 16.1 GB | 17.8 GB |
| Q5_K_M | 19.8 GB | 21.6 GB |
| Q6_K | 22.8 GB | 24.8 GB |
| Q8_0 | 29.5 GB | 31.9 GB |
| F16 | 55.6 GB | 59.2 GB |
KV cache by context length ESTIMATE
| Context | f16 | q8_0 | q4_0 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4k | 0.27 GB | 0.14 GB | 0.08 GB |
| 8k | 0.54 GB | 0.29 GB | 0.15 GB |
| 16k | 1.07 GB | 0.57 GB | 0.30 GB |
| 32k | 2.15 GB | 1.14 GB | 0.60 GB |
| 64k | 4.29 GB | 2.28 GB | 1.21 GB |
| 128k | 8.59 GB | 4.56 GB | 2.42 GB |
From config.json: 16 KV-caching attention layers, 4 KV heads × 256 head dim. Max context 256k. The tables above assume 4k context.
Which GPUs and Macs can run it?
✅ fits · ⚠️ fits with little headroom · ❌ doesn't fit on this one device (multiple GPUs or RAM offload may work; check your setup). Apple Silicon assumes macOS lets the GPU use ~67–75% of unified memory. All fit verdicts are estimates.
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