Short answer

Running a model locally keeps prompts on your machine, but you need enough GPU or unified memory for the weights plus the KV cache for your context. At 4-bit (Q4_K_M), weights take roughly 0.6 bytes per parameter, so a 27B model needs about 16.5 GB (15.4 GiB) before the cache. Mixture-of-experts models still need memory for all experts, even though each token uses only a few.

Memory estimates

Weights at llama.cpp's measured bits per weight (4.8944 for Q4_K_M, 8.5008 for Q8_0), plus FP16 KV cache for 8,192 tokens and one sequence, plus 10% overhead. Where the attention layout cannot be modelled, the KV cache is left out and the cell says so. Change any input in the VRAM estimator.

ModelParamsQ4_K_M + 8KQ8_0 + 8KLocal files
Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 heretic (p-e-w)4.02B3.76 GiB 5.62 GiB
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct abliterated (mlabonne)8.03B6.13 GiB 9.84 GiB
gpt-oss-20b heretic (p-e-w)20.9B13.3 GiB 23.0 GiB
Dolphin Mistral 24B Venice Edition24B16.4 GiB 27.5 GiB
Huihui Gemma 4 26B A4B QAT abliterated (GGUF)25.2B16.2 GiB 27.9 GiB
Gemma4-26B-A4B-QAT Uncensored HauhauCS Balanced (GGUF)25.2B16.2 GiB 27.9 GiB
Gemma 4 26B A4B ultra-uncensored heretic (llmfan46)25.8B16.6 GiB 28.5 GiB
Huihui Gemma 4 26B A4B abliterated25.8B16.6 GiB 28.5 GiB
Qwen3.8-27B Uncensored HauhauCS Aggressive (GGUF)27B17.5 GiB 29.9 GiB
Gemma 3 27B IT abliterated (mlabonne)27.4B18.3 GiB 31.0 GiB
Huihui Qwen3.8-27B abliterated27.8B18.0 GiB 30.8 GiB
GLM-4.7-Flash Uncensored HauhauCS Balanced (GGUF)29.9B18.8 GiB without KV cache32.6 GiB without KV cache
Huihui GLM-4.7-Flash abliterated31.2B19.6 GiB without KV cache34.0 GiB without KV cache
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct abliterated (huihui-ai)70.6B47.0 GiB 79.6 GiB
GLM-5.3-Flash320B200.6 GiB without KV cache348.3 GiB without KV cache
Huihui GLM-5.3-Flash abliterated (GGUF)321B201.0 GiB without KV cache349.2 GiB without KV cache
Estimates, not guarantees. Real use depends on the runtime, offloading, batch size and the exact file. Parameter counts include vision encoders where the repo does.

Before you download

Check the file, not the repo

GGUF repos contain many quantizations. File sizes on the card are the most direct memory guide for the weights.

Vision needs a projector

Image input in llama.cpp needs a separate projector (mmproj) file alongside the model.

Templates matter

Some cards warn that a runtime's chat template breaks the model. Read the card's runtime notes first.