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Computed

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 7B on a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER

Yes, at full precision, though context is limited to 10k tokens.

Verdict

Fits at FP16

14.7 GiB usable of 16 GB

Weights (Q4_K_M)

4.4 GiB

14.2 GiB at FP16 · 7.6B params · 6 of 6 quant rows are measured files

KV cache

56.0 KiB per token at FP16

28 layers × 4 KV heads × 128 dimensions

Speed ceiling

43 tok/s

672 GB/s ÷ bytes read per token

Every quant, against this card

Weight bytes are the size of the real published file wherever one exists — 6 of these6 rows are measured from bartowski/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B-GGUF, the rest computed from the parameter count. Max context is what the KV cache can grow to in whatever memory the weights leave behind, capped at the 128k tokens this model was trained to address.

14.7 GiB usableFP16 / BF16 · 14.2 GiBQ8_0 · 7.5 GiBQ6_K · 5.8 GiBQ5_K_M · 5.1 GiBQ4_K_M · 4.4 GiBQ3_K_M · 3.5 GiB
Bars are the weight bytes at each precision; the dashed line is the usable memory of a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER. Drawn from the computed byte counts, not sketched.
PrecisionBits/weightWeightsSourceFitsMax contextCeiling
FP16 / BF1616.0014.2 GiBmeasured fileyes10,01343 tok/s
Q8_08.517.5 GiBmeasured fileyes131,072 (model cap)78 tok/s
Q6_K6.575.8 GiBmeasured fileyes131,072 (model cap)100 tok/s
Q5_K_M5.725.1 GiBmeasured fileyes131,072 (model cap)114 tok/s
Q4_K_M4.924.4 GiBmeasured fileyes131,072 (model cap)130 tok/s
Q3_K_M4.003.5 GiBmeasured fileyes131,072 (model cap)157 tok/s

What the context actually costs

The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim bytes per token per element — 2 · 28 · 4 · 128 · 2 B = 56.0 KiB. It depends on the key/value head count, not the attention-head count and not the parameter count. This model shares 4 KV heads across 28 query heads, which divides the cache by 7 against multi-head attention.

ContextKV cache (FP16)KV cache (8-bit)Plus Q4_K_M weights
4,096224 MiB112 MiB4.6 GiB
8,192448 MiB224 MiB4.8 GiB
32,7681.8 GiB896 MiB6.1 GiB
131,0727.0 GiB3.5 GiB11.4 GiB

The speed ceiling, and where it comes from

Generating one token reads every active weight from memory once. At FP16 / BF16 that is 14.2 GiB, plus a pass over the KV cache. A GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER moves 672 GB/s (256-bit × 21 Gbps), so the arithmetic ceiling is 43 tok/s. Treat it as a bound, not an estimate: attention overhead, kernel launches and imperfect memory access keep real runtimes at roughly 60–80% of it, and nothing pushes past it.

Where these numbers come from

The model

Parameters
7,615,616,512
Layers
28
Attention / KV heads
28 / 4
Head dimension
128
Trained context
131,072
Checkpoint as published
14.2 GiB

Read from deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B. The parameter count is the Hub's own total over the tensor shapes, not a figure taken from the model's name.

The accelerator

Memory
16 GB GDDR6X
Bandwidth
672 GB/s
Bus
256-bit × 21 Gbps
Assumed usable
92% → 14.7 GiB

Capacity and bandwidth from the vendor's specification. The bandwidth figure is checked against the bus width and data rate it derives from. The usable fraction is an assumption, not a spec: a driver context, compute workspace and any attached display come out of the same pool before a weight is loaded.

Questions this pairing answers

How much VRAM does DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 7B need?

14.2 GiB for the weights at FP16 — 7.6B parameters at two bytes each — and 4.4 GiB at Q4_K_M. The KV cache is on top of that and is not a fixed number: this model spends 56.0 KiB per token of context, so 8,192 tokens costs a further 448 MiB. A GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER makes 14.7 GiB of its 16 GB available on the assumption below.

Can a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER run DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 7B?

Yes, at full precision, though context is limited to 10k tokens. That is the weights and the KV cache together, against 14.7 GiB of usable memory.

How fast will DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 7B run on a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER?

No faster than 43 tokens/second at FP16 / BF16, and in practice below it. Decoding is memory-bound: every token reads all 14.2 GiB of weights plus the cache, and this card moves 672 GB/s. That division is the ceiling — no kernel, runtime or driver beats it, and a real runtime typically reaches 60–80% of it.

Why does the context length change how much memory DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 7B needs?

Because the KV cache holds one key and one value vector per token, per layer, for the whole conversation, and it is allocated separately from the weights. This model has 28 layers and 4 key/value heads of 128 dimensions, shared across 28 query heads — grouped-query attention, which divides the cache by 7. That works out at 56.0 KiB per token. Parameter count tells you nothing about this number.

The same model on a different card

A different model on the same card

All 62 models on GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER →

Method and limits. Weight bytes are the byte size of the real published file wherever one exists, and the model's exact parameter count times the published llama.cpp bits-per-weight where it does not. That distinction is on every row above and it matters at both ends: a sub-1B model's Q4_K_M file runs a third larger than the nominal figure because k-quants keep its embedding tables at higher precision, and an already-4-bit release cannot be quantized upward at all. The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim · bytes per token, summed over layers with each sliding-window layer capped at its window. The speed figure is a roofline bound, not a benchmark: bandwidth divided by bytes read per token, which no runtime exceeds and every runtime falls short of. The usable fraction of card memory is an assumption: 92% here, which is what this lane assumes for a dedicated card — the other class assumes 75%, so it is not one number applied to every device. That is the only assumed input on this page; every other figure is computed from the model config and the card's published specification. Nothing on this page is written by a language model. Architecture from the model's published config, fetched 2026-08-07.