Alibaba Cloud14B~10 GB VRAM at Q4_K_M

Qwen 3 14B — VRAM, speed & local setup

Written by Jakub Rusinowski · Last updated

A powerhouse 14B model with hybrid thinking. Beats Qwen 2.5 72B in reasoning benchmarks despite being 5x smaller. Perfect for RTX 4070/4080 users who want frontier-level reasoning locally.

Qwen 3 14B needs about 10 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.

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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
7 GB~104 tok/sFits
Q3_K_M
3.41 bpw
8.5 GB~87 tok/sFits
Q4_K_M
4.83 bpw
11.1 GB~67 tok/sFits
Q5_K_M
5.67 bpw
12.6 GB~59 tok/sFits
Q6_K
6.56 bpw
14.3 GB~52 tok/sFits
Q8_0
8.50 bpw
17.9 GB~42 tok/sFits
F16
16.00 bpw
31.7 GB~4 tok/sOffload

Black marker = usable memory on the NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB). Estimates from the memory-bandwidth roofline on the methodology page. Qwen 3 14B VRAM calculator →

Get Qwen 3 14B running

The cheapest catalogued GPU that runs Qwen 3 14B is the Intel Arc B580 (12 GB).

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Intel Arc B580 12GB
12 GB VRAM · 190 W board power
2026 prices are volatile — check the current listing.

How to run Qwen 3 14B

Install Ollama, then run:

ollama run qwen3:14b
Weights on Hugging Face: Qwen/Qwen3-14B ↗

Specifications

Curated — A hand-written entry from before this catalogue recorded its sources. The figures are long-standing but their provenance is not on file.

Parameters
14 Billion
Context window
128,000
Architecture
Dense
Provider
Alibaba Cloud
Licence
Apache 2.0
Practical deployment
Laptop
Specified at
Q4_K_M
System RAM
24 GB
Record updated
2025-04-28
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.

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Can I run Qwen 3 14B on my GPU?

Other Qwen 3 sizes

Qwen 3 14B — frequently asked questions

How much VRAM does Qwen 3 14B need?

About 10 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 Qwen 3 14B run on an RTX 4090 (24 GB)?

Yes. Qwen 3 14B needs about 10 GB at Q4_K_M, inside a 24 GB card, at an estimated 67 tokens/sec.

How do I run Qwen 3 14B locally?

Install Ollama and run `ollama run qwen3:14b`. That pulls the weights and starts a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint; after the download nothing leaves the machine.

What other sizes does Qwen 3 come in?

Qwen 3 8B (6 GB), Qwen 3 14B (10 GB), Qwen 3 32B (21 GB), Qwen 3 30B-A3B (MoE) (19 GB), Qwen 3 235B-A22B (MoE) (143 GB). Every size shares the family's training and licence; the larger ones score higher and need proportionally more memory.