Mistral AI24B~15 GB VRAM at Q4_K_M

Mistral Small 3.2 24B — VRAM, speed & local setup

Written by Jakub Rusinowski · Last updated

23.6B dense with vision, 128K context, Apache 2.0. Mistral describes it explicitly as surgical: no architecture change from 3.1, just better instruction adherence, tool use and structured output, plus HumanEval Plus at 92.90%. 15.0 GB at Q4_K_M.

Mistral Small 3.2 24B needs about 15 GB of VRAM at Q4_K_M — quantized weights plus framework overhead, before any KV cache. On Apple Silicon that figure comes out of unified memory.

Logic84
Creative82
Coding84

VRAM and speed by quantization

Quoted against NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB). Includes the KV cache at 8K context, so it reads higher than the headline figure.

QuantVRAMSpeed (est.)Fit
Q2_K
2.63 bpw
9.9 GB~75 tok/sFits
Q3_K_M
3.41 bpw
12.2 GB~61 tok/sFits
Q4_K_M
4.83 bpw
16.4 GB~45 tok/sFits
Q5_K_M
5.67 bpw
18.9 GB~40 tok/sFits
Q6_K
6.56 bpw
21.5 GB~35 tok/sFits
Q8_0
8.50 bpw
27.2 GB~4 tok/sOffload
F16
16.00 bpw
49.3 GB~2 tok/sOffload

Black marker = usable memory on the NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB). Estimates from the memory-bandwidth roofline on the methodology page. Mistral Small 3.2 24B VRAM calculator →

Get Mistral Small 3.2 24B running

The cheapest catalogued GPU that runs Mistral Small 3.2 24B is the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT (20 GB).

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AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT 20GB
20 GB VRAM · 315 W board power
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How to run Mistral Small 3.2 24B

Install Ollama, then run:

ollama run mistral-small:24b

Specifications

Verified — Checked against the primary source — the model card or the vendor spec page — and corroborated by a second independent source.

Parameters
23.6 Billion
Context window
131,072
Architecture
Dense Transformer (vision)
Provider
Mistral AI
Licence
Apache 2.0
Practical deployment
Single consumer GPU
Specified at
Q4_K_M
System RAM
32 GB
Record updated
2026-09-06
LicenceApache-2.0Commercial use permitted

Commercial use permitted. No usage restrictions beyond attribution.

Quality and use cases

Scores as published by the model’s authors or an independent evaluator — quality, not throughput, and not measured by us.

Best forgeneral purposecodingfunction callingmultimodal
BenchmarkScoreProvenance
HumanEval Plus92.9 / 100 %reported · https://docs.mistral.ai/models/mistral-small-3-2-25-06
Arena Hard43.1 / 100 %reported · https://venturebeat.com/ai/mistral-just-updated-its-open-source-small-model-from-3-1-to-3-2-heres-why

Can I run Mistral Small 3.2 24B on my GPU?

Mistral Small 3.2 24B — frequently asked questions

How much VRAM does Mistral Small 3.2 24B need?

About 15 GB at Q4_K_M — quantized weights plus framework overhead, before any KV cache. The cache grows with context length and is added on top; the table above folds it in. Apple Silicon counts unified memory toward the same figure.

Does Mistral Small 3.2 24B run on an RTX 4090 (24 GB)?

Yes. Mistral Small 3.2 24B needs about 15 GB at Q4_K_M, inside a 24 GB card, at an estimated 45 tokens/sec.

How do I run Mistral Small 3.2 24B locally?

Install Ollama and run `ollama run mistral-small:24b`. That pulls the weights and starts a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint; after the download nothing leaves the machine.