Calculated from model configuration — not yet manually verified. Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B is not in the curated catalogue; its shape was read from the repository’s config.json. What that means.

Only with CPU offload

Qwen3.5-27B at Q4_K_M needs 16.7 GB but only 10.6 GB is addressable, so about 39% of the layers would stream from system RAM at roughly 60 GB/s. Expect around 4.9 tokens per second — usable for batch work, painful for chat.

61% on GPU 8K context Q4_K_M · 15.6 GB Apache 2.0 Released 24 Feb 2026 Vision Not in the Ollama library

Sized from Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B's config.json — not a hand-verified catalogue entry.

What hardware do I need for Qwen3.5-27B? →

Read from config.json

Architecture
Qwen3_5ForConditionalGeneration
Parameters
27.78B
Active / token
dense
Layers
64 (16 with KV cache)
Attention heads
24
KV heads
4
Head dim
256
Context window
256K
Experts
none
KV cache / layer
2048 elements

Parameter count is safetensors index; the active count for mixture-of-experts models is computed from expert sizes and may differ from the model card by a few percent. Pipeline: image-text-to-text · 1,888,406 downloads.

GGUF conversions found

The llama.cpp command above uses the original repo id; point -hf at one of these if the original has no GGUF files.

The VRAM budget

weights 15.6 GB
Weights 15.6 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.50 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Over budget 6.1 GB past 10.6 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
Q8_0 27.5 GB 28.6 GB — ~1.9 −0.1% ppl 18.0 GB over
Q6_K 21.2 GB 22.3 GB — ~2.8 −0.4% ppl 11.7 GB over
Q5_K_M 18.3 GB 19.4 GB — ~3.6 −0.8% ppl 8.8 GB over
Q4_K_M 15.6 GB 16.7 GB — ~4.9 −1.9% ppl 6.1 GB over
Q3_K_M 12.6 GB 13.7 GB — ~8.3 −5.4% ppl 3.1 GB over
Q2_K 10.8 GB 11.9 GB — ~14 −15% ppl 1.3 GB over

Quality is the published perplexity delta against f16 weights. Max context assumes an f16 KV cache; q8_0 roughly doubles it. Only 16 of its 64 blocks keep a per-token KV cache; the rest are linear-attention, Mamba or convolution blocks with a fixed-size state.

How to run it

terminal
$ llama-server \
    -hf Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B:Q4_K_M \
    -c 8192 -ngl 38

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

01Download is 15.6 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.
03If it falls back to CPU silently, drop the context first, then step down a quantisation.
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