Hardware requirement
EstimatedRunning Llama 3.3 70B as Q4_K_M at ~8,192 tokens of context.
VRAM to run on GPU
45 GB
48 GB class card
System RAM
64 GB
recommended
Storage
2 TB
NVMe recommended
GPU importance
Critical
memory-bound workload
How this is calculated
|
Model weights
derived
|
40.9 GB | 70.554 billion parameters × 0.58 bytes/param (Q4_K_M) ≈ 40.9 GB. |
|
KV cache (context memory)
derived
|
2.7 GB | 8,192 tokens × 80 layers × 2 × 8 KV heads × 128 head dim × 2 bytes ≈ 2.7 GB. Grows with context length. |
|
Runtime overhead
estimate
|
1.5 GB | Fixed VRAM overhead for activations and framework context. |
|
Total VRAM to run fully on GPU
estimate
|
45.1 GB | Weights + KV cache + overhead. This is what you need to keep the whole model on the graphics card for full speed. |
|
Recommended system RAM
estimate
|
64 GB | Headroom to load the model, run the OS, and hold any layers offloaded from the GPU. Rounded up to a standard kit size. |
|
Storage
estimate
|
2 TB NVMe recommended | Local model files are large (often tens of GB each). An NVMe SSD keeps load times reasonable. |
Memory figures are estimates derived from published model facts using a fixed method. They are not benchmarks. We do not publish tokens-per-second figures because we have no measured source for them.
Quantizations
Smaller quantizations use less memory with some quality trade-off. The default below balances size and quality.
| Variant | Bytes / param | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M default | 0.58 | Best size/quality balance — the usual pick. |
| Q5_K_M | 0.69 | A little larger, slightly better quality. |
| Q8_0 | 1.06 | Near-lossless; roughly 8-bit weights. |
| FP16 | 2 | Full half-precision weights; maximum fidelity, largest footprint. |
Architecture facts sourced from the model creator's published configuration: https://huggingface.co/meta-llama.