Yes, just — 1.4 GB spare

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B at Q4_K_M fits your GeForce RTX 3090 Ti entirely on the GPU at 8K context, at an estimated 33 tokens per second. Past 13K the KV cache pushes it over — quantise the cache to q8_0, or step down a quantisation, to go longer.

Fully on GPU 8K context Q4_K_M · 18.4 GB MIT Released Jan 2025

MIT-licensed and close to the 70B distill on maths. A 24 GB card handles it at Q4.

What hardware do I need for DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 18.4 GB

Weights 18.4 GB KV cache @ 8K 2.00 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 1.4 GB of 22.4 GB

Quantisation ladder

Quant	Weights	Total @ 8K	Max context	Tok/s	Quality	Fit
Q8_0	32.5 GB	35.1 GB	—	~2.6	−0.1% ppl	12.7 GB over
Q6_K	25.0 GB	27.6 GB	—	~5.7	−0.4% ppl	5.2 GB over
Q5_K_M	21.7 GB	24.3 GB	—	~12	−0.8% ppl	1.9 GB over
Q4_K_M	18.4 GB	21.0 GB	13K	33	−1.9% ppl	Recommended
Q3_K_M	14.9 GB	17.5 GB	27K	41	−5.4% ppl	Long context
Q2_K	12.8 GB	15.4 GB	36K	48	−15% ppl	Long context

Quality is the published perplexity delta against f16 weights. Max context assumes an f16 KV cache; q8_0 roughly doubles it.

How to run it

Ollama llama.cpp LM Studio vLLM

terminal

$ llama-server \
    -hf deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B:Q4_K_M \
    -c 8192 -ngl 99

The engine underneath most of the others. Every knob is exposed. More on llama.cpp.

01Download is 18.4 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.

02Close anything else holding VRAM. A browser with hardware acceleration can sit on 1–2 GB.

03Only 1.4 GB is spare, so a long system prompt can still push it over. Its real ceiling here is 13K context.

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