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

Can the Radeon RX 9070 run Llama 4 Maverick (17B x 128E) Instruct?

Does not fit at Q4_K_M.

Llama 4 Maverick (17B x 128E) Instruct is 400B parameters (MoE; all experts resident). At Q4_K_M the weights are about 223.5 GiB; with the 1.5 GiB runtime reserve that is 225.0 GiB against the card's 16GB, about 209.0 GiB more than the card has.

All three quants

16GB card
QuantWeightsWith reserveVerdictHeadroom
Q4_K_Mthe everyday quant223.5 GiB225.0 GiBDoes not fitshort 209.0 GiB
Q8_0near-lossless394.9 GiB396.4 GiBDoes not fitshort 380.4 GiB
FP16full weights745.1 GiB746.6 GiBDoes not fitshort 730.6 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.

Nothing in the consumer catalog fits Llama 4 Maverick (17B x 128E) Instruct at Q4 on a single card; this is multi-GPU or datacenter territory, or a job for hosted inference (see PicksByModel for per-token pricing).

What the Radeon RX 9070 does run well → · Llama 4 Maverick (17B x 128E) Instruct on every card →

About the model

Llama 4 Maverick (17B x 128E) Instruct by Meta: 1,048,576-token native context, text + vision, released 2025 under the Llama 4 Community License. Model card → · Hosted pricing on PicksByModel →

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