picksbycard
October 7, 2026No. 158
Radeon RX 9070 · 16GB GDDR6

Can the Radeon RX 9070 run Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1?

Only with CPU offload 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 16GB, about 11.6 GiB more than the card has.

All three quants

16GB card
QuantWeightsWith reserveVerdictHeadroom
Q4_K_Mthe everyday quant26.1 GiB27.6 GiBOnly with CPU offloadshort 11.6 GiB
Q8_0near-lossless46.1 GiB47.6 GiBDoes not fitshort 31.6 GiB
FP16full weights87.0 GiB88.5 GiBDoes not fitshort 72.5 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.

The numbers for this pairing

At Q4_K_M the weights take about 26.1 GiB, so with the 1.5 GiB runtime reserve it needs 27.6 GB: 11.6 GB more than the card's 16 GB.

No version of it fits entirely in this card's memory, so it would lean on system RAM and run far slower.

It is a mixture-of-experts model: about 12.9B of its 46.7B parameters work on each token, which helps speed, but all of them still have to fit in memory.

At about $570, this card costs roughly $36 per GB of VRAM.

Running it at its full 220 W board power for 4 hours a day would use about 26 kWh a month, about $4.86 at the US average residential rate of 18.4 cents per kWh (2026-05); real use sits below that ceiling.

Prices are the lowest current listings our tracker saw on Oct 7, 2026, since averages include premium variants; launch prices are marked where we have no listing.

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 Radeon RX 9070 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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