picksbycard
August 23, 2026No. 113
GeForce RTX 5060 · 8GB GDDR7

Can the GeForce RTX 5060 run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B?

Only with CPU offload at Q4_K_M.

DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B is 14.8B parameters. At Q4_K_M the weights are about 8.3 GiB; with the 1.5 GiB runtime reserve that is 9.8 GiB against the card's 8GB, about 1.8 GiB more than the card has.

All three quants

8GB card
QuantWeightsWith reserveVerdictHeadroom
Q4_K_Mthe everyday quant8.3 GiB9.8 GiBOnly with CPU offloadshort 1.8 GiB
Q8_0near-lossless14.6 GiB16.1 GiBDoes not fitshort 8.1 GiB
FP16full weights27.6 GiB29.1 GiBDoes not fitshort 21.1 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.

Not this card. These fit it comfortably at Q4.

What the GeForce RTX 5060 does run well → · DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B on every card →

About the model

DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B by DeepSeek: 131,072-token native context, text, released 2025 under the MIT. Model card →

The Silicon Note

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