Qwen3.5-35B-A3B: hardware requirements

Qwen3.5-35B-A3B needs about 25 GB of memory at Q4 quantization — a 22 GB download plus room for context and overhead. That fits a machine with 32GB RAM.

Parameters
36B
Tier
Needs a good desktop
Licence
See model card
Released
2026-02-16

This is a mixture-of-experts model. Only a fraction of its 36B parameters are used for each token, so it runs faster than its size suggests — but all of it still has to fit in memory. The speed is that of a small model; the memory requirement is that of a large one. More on this →

Will it run on your machine?

Download sizes by quantization

Lower quantization means a smaller file and less memory, at some cost to quality. Q4_K_M is the usual starting point. What is this?

QuantDownloadRAM @ 4KRAM @ 32KSource
Q4_K_Mrecommended22 GB25 GB27 GBmeasured
Q5_K_M26 GB29 GB32 GBmeasured
Q6_K29 GB32 GB34 GBmeasured
Q8_037 GB40 GB43 GBmeasured
BF1670 GB74 GB76 GBmeasured

“Measured” sizes are read from published GGUF files (unsloth/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF). “Estimated” sizes are derived from the parameter count and are typically within a few percent. The RAM columns add the context cache and runtime overhead to the download size.

Other sizes of Qwen3.5 397B A17B