picksbycard
August 23, 2026No. 113
Radeon RX 9070 ยท 16GB GDDR6

Can the Radeon RX 9070 run DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B?

Fits comfortably at Q4_K_M.

DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B is 8.03B parameters. At Q4_K_M the weights are about 4.5 GiB; with the 1.5 GiB runtime reserve that is 6.0 GiB against the card's 16GB, leaving about 10.0 GiB for context.

All three quants

16GB card
QuantWeightsWith reserveVerdictHeadroom
Q4_K_Mthe everyday quant4.5 GiB6.0 GiBFits comfortably10.0 GiB
Q8_0near-lossless7.9 GiB9.4 GiBFits comfortably6.6 GiB
FP16full weights15.0 GiB16.5 GiBOnly with CPU offloadshort 0.5 GiB

Verdict rules: fits comfortably when weights plus reserve sit within 85% of VRAM; tight when they fit with little left for context; CPU offload when they exceed VRAM by up to 2x (runs, slowly, with layers in system RAM); no beyond that. The KV cache per token depends on the model's architecture and is not modelled here.

Good match. Get the card.

The Radeon RX 9070 clears DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B at Q4_K_M and at Q8_0. Live listings below; this page was rebuilt 2026-08-23.

Amazon links may earn us a commission. Prices move daily; the links open live listings.

About the model

DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B by DeepSeek: 131,072-token native context, text, released 2025 under the MIT. Model card →

The Silicon Note

One short read on the GPU market, most mornings. No spam, one-click out.