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October 7, 2026No. 158
Home / Will it run? / Qwen3.6 35B-A3B / Radeon RX 7900 XTX
Radeon RX 7900 XTX · 24GB GDDR6

Can the Radeon RX 7900 XTX run Qwen3.6 35B-A3B?

Fits, tight on context at Q4_K_M.

Qwen3.6 35B-A3B is 36B parameters (MoE; all experts resident). At Q4_K_M the weights are about 20.1 GiB; with the 1.5 GiB runtime reserve that is 21.6 GiB against the card's 24GB, leaving about 2.4 GiB for context.

All three quants

24GB card
QuantWeightsWith reserveVerdictHeadroom
Q4_K_Mthe everyday quant20.1 GiB21.6 GiBFits, tight on context2.4 GiB
Q8_0near-lossless35.5 GiB37.0 GiBOnly with CPU offloadshort 13.0 GiB
FP16full weights67.1 GiB68.6 GiBDoes not fitshort 44.6 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.

The numbers for this pairing

At Q4_K_M the weights take about 20.1 GiB; with the 1.5 GiB we set aside for the runtime that is 21.6 of the card's 24 GB, leaving about 2.4 GB for the context cache.

It is a mixture-of-experts model: about 3B of its 36B parameters work on each token, which helps speed, but all of them still have to fit in memory.

The cheapest card on our list that runs it comfortably at Q4 is the GeForce RTX 5090 at about $6,500, against about $850 for this card.

At about $850, this card costs roughly $35 per GB of VRAM.

Running it at its full 355 W board power for 4 hours a day would use about 43 kWh a month, about $7.84 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.

Good match. Get the card.

The Radeon RX 7900 XTX clears Qwen3.6 35B-A3B at Q4_K_M. Live listings below; this page was rebuilt 2026-10-07.

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About the model

Qwen3.6 35B-A3B by Alibaba Qwen: 262,144-token native context, text + vision, released 2026 under the Apache-2.0. Model card → · Hosted pricing on PicksByModel →

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