VRAM TIER DIRECTORY โ€ข 32 GB ENVELOPE8 of 12 Models Fit

Best Local LLMs for 32GB VRAM

Typical Hardware:NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 32GB GDDR7MacBook Pro M4 Pro 36GBRTX 5000 Ada 32GB

32GB GDDR7 delivers up to 1,792 GB/s memory bandwidth. Easily fits 32B models at Q8_0 or 70B models at IQ3_XS / NVFP4 quantization with 65K context.

โœ… Runs 100% in GPU VRAM (Optimal Headroom)21.93 GB (69%)~70 t/s

Model & Target Hardware

interactive
Agentic Coding, Terminal Workflows & Multi-File Refactoring
Qwen 3.8 27B Instruct on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB GDDR7)

โœ“ Fits Comfortably in VRAM

โœ“ FITS IN VRAM
Required VRAM
21.93 GB
69% of hardware capacity (32 GB)
Est. Decode Speed
~70 tok/s
Dense model @ 1792 GB/s
Available Headroom
+10.07 GB
Safe for OS display & full context
Memory Allocation & Headroom
21.93 GB allocated of 32 GB capacity
69% utilized
Weights: 16.32 GB
KV: (32K): 4.29 GB
Overhead: 1.32 GB
Free Headroom: +10.07 GB
โšก Architecture & Throughput Transparency: Single-user decode speed (~70 tok/s) is memory-bandwidth bound at batch size = 1 on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB GDDR7) (1792 GB/s). Prompt prefill / TTFT (~1,015 tok/s) is compute-bound and utilizes GPU Tensor cores. Actual latency varies with FlashAttention-2 and runtime engine (Ollama/vLLM/llama.cpp).
OLLAMA_FLASH_ATTENTION=1 OLLAMA_KV_CACHE_TYPE=q8_0 ollama run qwen3.8:27b

Quantization Precision Matrix

32K ctx โ€ข KV: Q8_0
QuantizationWeightsKV CacheTotal VRAMEst. SpeedFit Status
FP1616 bpw54.4 GB4.29 GB61.34 GB (192%)0 t/sOOM
Q8_08.5 bpw28.83 GB4.29 GB34.88 GB (109%)~9 t/sPARTIAL
Q6_K6.56 bpw22.3 GB4.29 GB28.12 GB (88%)~52 t/sFITS
Q5_K_M5.68 bpw19.31 GB4.29 GB25.03 GB (78%)~60 t/sFITS
Q4_K_M4.8 bpw16.32 GB4.29 GB21.93 GB (69%)~70 t/sFITS
FP44.25 bpw14.42 GB4.29 GB19.96 GB (62%)~79 t/sFITS
IQ3_XS3.3 bpw11.15 GB4.29 GB16.58 GB (52%)~100 t/sFITS

Local Hardware Configurations & Pricing

High-bandwidth VRAM specs and current market prices
Consumer GPU32 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB GDDR7)

Maximum tokens/sec on 27Bโ€“35B models & Blackwell FP4 quantization

1792 GB/s575W TDP
Consumer GPU24 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24GB GDDR6X)

The 24GB CUDA enthusiast standard for 14Bโ€“32B Q4_K_M models

1008 GB/s450W TDP
Multi-GPU Rig48 GB VRAM

2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM)

Best price-to-VRAM homelab rig for 70B Q4_K_M & Qwen 3.8 27B Q8

936 GB/s700W TDP
Consumer GPU16 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 (16GB GDDR7)

Blazing fast 8Bโ€“14B coding models with FP4/Q6_K precision

960 GB/s360W TDP

Export Full Architecture & Infrastructure Spec

Get an executive-ready PDF report with exact memory math, hardware benchmarks, and cost comparisons.

All Open Models Evaluated on 32GB VRAM

Standard Q4_K_M quantization with 32K context window and Q8_0 KV cache

Hardware: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB GDDR7)
ModelArchitectureVRAM RequiredHeadroomEst. Decode SpeedCompatibilityOllama Command
Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B MoE
Ultra-Fast 100+ tok/s Coding & Local RAG on 24GB GPUs
35B MoE24.1 GB+7.9 GB free~553 t/sFITSollama run qwen3.6:35b-a3b
Microsoft Phi-4 Mini 3.8B
Ultra-Light Laptop & CPU/Integrated GPU Inference
3.8B Dense3.92 GB+28.1 GB free~491 t/sFITSollama run phi4-mini:3.8b
Google Gemma 4 E4B (Edge 4B)
8GB Laptop GPUs, Local Autocomplete & Fast Summarization
4.1B Dense4.24 GB+27.8 GB free~452 t/sFITSollama run gemma4:4b
Google Gemma 4 26B MoE
High-Speed Consumer GPU & Apple Silicon Daily Assistant
26.4B MoE20.23 GB+11.8 GB free~370 t/sFITSollama run gemma4:26b
Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
Fast 8GBโ€“12GB GPU Chat, Classification & Local Agents
8B Dense7.87 GB+24.1 GB free~228 t/sFITSollama run llama3.1:8b
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Qwen 14B
Mainstream 12GBโ€“16GB Gaming GPUs Reasoning Assistant
14.8B Dense13.16 GB+18.8 GB free~126 t/sFITSollama run deepseek-r1:14b
Qwen 3.8 27B Instruct
Agentic Coding, Terminal Workflows & Multi-File Refactoring
27.2B Dense21.93 GB+10.1 GB free~70 t/sFITSollama run qwen3.8:27b
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Qwen 32B
Local Step-by-Step Math, Logic & Code Verification
32.8B Dense25.41 GB+6.6 GB free~59 t/sFITSollama run deepseek-r1:32b
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (552B Engram MoE)
Frontier SWE Coding (77.0 DeepSWE), 1M Context & 3D/Game Synthesis
552B MoE345.59 GB-313.6 GB short0 (OOM)OOMDeploy on Cloud GPU โ†’
Meta Muse Spark Open (816B-A42B MoE)
Frontier Multi-Step Agentic Reasoning & Native Multimodal
816B MoE512.86 GB-480.9 GB short0 (OOM)OOMDeploy on Cloud GPU โ†’
Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE)
Long-Context Codebase Indexing & Multi-Document Analysis
109B MoE71.66 GB-39.7 GB short0 (OOM)OOMDeploy on Cloud GPU โ†’
Meta Llama 3.3 70B Instruct
Standard 70B Dense Enterprise Baseline for 48GBโ€“64GB Rigs
70.6B Dense49.96 GB-18 GB short0 (OOM)OOMDeploy on Cloud GPU โ†’

Need to Run Models Larger than 32GB?

If your preferred model exceeds your local 32GB GPU, you can rent high-memory on-demand cloud GPUs with zero upfront hardware costs:

24GBโ€“32GB Cloud VRAM

Rent RTX 4090 / RTX 5090

Boot an on-demand RTX 4090 (24GB) from $0.59/hr or RTX 5090 (32GB) from $0.89/hr on RunPod.

Deploy on RunPod ($0.59/hr) โ†’
48GBโ€“80GB High VRAM

Rent Dual 3090 or H100

Dual 3090 (48GB) from $0.78/hr on Vast.ai, or H100 (80GB HBM3) from $2.39/hr for 70B+ models.

Rent on Vast.ai ($0.78/hr) โ†’