Yes — with 32.8 GB to spare

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B at Q4_K_M fits your CPU only · DDR5 dual-channel entirely on the GPU at 8K context, at an estimated 9.3 tokens per second. There is room for its full 256K window.

Fully on GPU 8K context Q4_K_M · 17.8 GB OpenMDW-1.1 Released 11 Aug 2026 New this month

Mamba-2 + MoE hybrid built for the execution layer of agents: only 6 attention blocks, so the KV cache is almost free. Weights, data and recipe all open.

What hardware do I need for Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 17.8 GB
Weights 17.8 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.05 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 32.8 GB of 51.2 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
Q8_0 31.3 GB 31.9 GB 256K 5.3 −0.1% ppl Long context
Q6_K 24.1 GB 24.8 GB 256K 6.9 −0.4% ppl Long context
Q5_K_M 20.9 GB 21.5 GB 256K 7.9 −0.8% ppl Long context
Q4_K_M 17.8 GB 18.4 GB 256K 9.3 −1.9% ppl Recommended
Q3_K_M 14.4 GB 15.0 GB 256K 12 −5.4% ppl Long context
Q2_K 12.3 GB 13.0 GB 256K 13 −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. Only 6 of its 52 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 nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-BF16:Q4_K_M \
    -c 8192 -ngl 99

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

01Download is 17.8 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.
02With no GPU, thread count matters more than clock. Start at one thread per physical core.
03There is room to go to the model's full 256K context on this card.
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