Yes — with 16.1 GB to spare

Qwen3.5 9B at Q4_K_M fits your GeForce RTX 3090 entirely on the GPU at 8K context, at an estimated 104 tokens per second. There is room for its full 256K window.

Fully on GPU 8K context Q4_K_M · 5.4 GB Apache 2.0 Released 28 Feb 2026 Vision

The default for 8–12 GB cards in 2026: beats every older 8B on every published benchmark, with vision.

What hardware do I need for Qwen3.5 9B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 5.4 GB

Weights 5.4 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.25 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 16.1 GB of 22.4 GB

Quantisation ladder

Quant	Weights	Total @ 8K	Max context	Tok/s	Quality	Fit
F16	18.0 GB	18.8 GB	122K	32	Reference	Long context
Q8_0	9.5 GB	10.4 GB	256K	59	−0.1% ppl	Long context
Q6_K	7.4 GB	8.2 GB	256K	77	−0.4% ppl	Long context
Q5_K_M	6.4 GB	7.2 GB	256K	89	−0.8% ppl	Long context
Q4_K_M	5.4 GB	6.3 GB	256K	104	−1.9% ppl	Recommended
Q3_K_M	4.4 GB	5.2 GB	256K	129	−5.4% ppl	Long context
Q2_K	3.8 GB	4.6 GB	256K	151	−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 8 of its 32 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

Ollama llama.cpp LM Studio vLLM

terminal

$ ollama pull qwen3.5:9b
$ OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=8192 \
    ollama run qwen3.5:9b

The default. One binary, a model registry, an OpenAI-compatible port. More on Ollama.

01Download is 5.4 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.

03There is room to go to the model's full 256K context on this card.

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