picksbycard
August 23, 2026No. 113
GeForce RTX 5070 · 12GB GDDR7

Can the GeForce RTX 5070 run Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1?

Does not fit at Q4_K_M.

Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1 is 46.7B parameters (MoE; all experts resident). At Q4_K_M the weights are about 26.1 GiB; with the 1.5 GiB runtime reserve that is 27.6 GiB against the card's 12GB, about 15.6 GiB more than the card has.

All three quants

12GB card
QuantWeightsWith reserveVerdictHeadroom
Q4_K_Mthe everyday quant26.1 GiB27.6 GiBDoes not fitshort 15.6 GiB
Q8_0near-lossless46.1 GiB47.6 GiBDoes not fitshort 35.6 GiB
FP16full weights87.0 GiB88.5 GiBDoes not fitshort 76.5 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.

Not this card. These fit it comfortably at Q4.

Nothing in the consumer catalog fits Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1 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 GeForce RTX 5070 does run well → · Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1 on every card →

About the model

Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1 by Mistral AI: 32,768-token native context, text, released 2023 under the Apache-2.0. Model card →

The Silicon Note

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