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Computed

Qwen3 30B-A3B on a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti

Yes, quantized. Q3_K_M is the largest that fits, leaving room for 11k tokens of context.

Verdict

Q3_K_M

14.7 GiB usable of 16 GB

Weights (Q4_K_M)

17.3 GiB

56.9 GiB at FP16 · 30.5B params · 6 of 6 quant rows are measured files

KV cache

96.0 KiB per token at FP16

48 layers × 4 KV heads × 128 dimensions

Speed ceiling

370 tok/s

896 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 unsloth/Qwen3-30B-A3B-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 40k tokens this model was trained to address.

14.7 GiB usableFP16 / BF16 · 56.9 GiBQ8_0 · 30.3 GiBQ6_K · 23.4 GiBQ5_K_M · 20.2 GiBQ4_K_M · 17.3 GiBQ3_K_M · 13.7 GiB
Bars are the weight bytes at each precision; the dashed line is the usable memory of a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Drawn from the computed byte counts, not sketched.
PrecisionBits/weightWeightsSourceFitsMax contextCeiling
FP16 / BF1616.0056.9 GiBmeasured file−42.2 GiB15.1 tok/s offloaded
Q8_08.5130.3 GiBmeasured file−15.5 GiB32.0 tok/s offloaded
Q6_K6.5723.4 GiBmeasured file−8.6 GiB45.0 tok/s offloaded
Q5_K_M5.6920.2 GiBmeasured file−5.5 GiB55.2 tok/s offloaded
Q4_K_M4.8617.3 GiBmeasured file−2.6 GiB70.2 tok/s offloaded
Q3_K_M3.8513.7 GiBmeasured fileyes11,125370 tok/s

What the context actually costs

The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim bytes per token per element — 2 · 48 · 4 · 128 · 2 B = 96.0 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 32 query heads, which divides the cache by 8 against multi-head attention.

ContextKV cache (FP16)KV cache (8-bit)Plus Q4_K_M weights
4,096384 MiB192 MiB17.7 GiB
8,192768 MiB384 MiB18.0 GiB
32,7683.0 GiB1.5 GiB20.3 GiB

The speed ceiling, and where it comes from

Generating one token reads every active weight from memory once. At Q3_K_M that is 1.5 GiB — only 11% of the checkpoint, because this is a mixture of experts and each token is routed to 8 of 128, plus a pass over the KV cache. A GeForce RTX 5070 Ti moves 896 GB/s (256-bit × 28 Gbps), so the arithmetic ceiling is 370 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
30,532,122,624
Layers
48
Attention / KV heads
32 / 4
Head dimension
128
Trained context
40,960
Checkpoint as published
56.9 GiB

Read from Qwen/Qwen3-30B-A3B. 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 GDDR7
Bandwidth
896 GB/s
Bus
256-bit × 28 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 Qwen3 30B-A3B need?

56.9 GiB for the weights at FP16 — 30.5B parameters at two bytes each — and 17.3 GiB at Q4_K_M. The KV cache is on top of that and is not a fixed number: this model spends 96.0 KiB per token of context, so 8,192 tokens costs a further 768 MiB. A GeForce RTX 5070 Ti makes 14.7 GiB of its 16 GB available on the assumption below.

Can a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti run Qwen3 30B-A3B?

Yes, quantized. Q3_K_M is the largest that fits, leaving room for 11k tokens of context. That is the weights and the KV cache together, against 14.7 GiB of usable memory.

How fast will Qwen3 30B-A3B run on a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti?

No faster than 370 tokens/second at Q3_K_M, and in practice below it. Decoding is memory-bound: every token reads the 11% of weights this MoE routes to 1.5 GiB of weights plus the cache, and this card moves 896 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 Qwen3 30B-A3B 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 48 layers and 4 key/value heads of 128 dimensions, shared across 32 query heads — grouped-query attention, which divides the cache by 8. That works out at 96.0 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 5070 Ti →

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.