Comment by walrus01

12 hours ago

I guess it depends if we're talking about decent new car at $40,000 or $95,000? I've seen lots of people claiming they're running v4.1 flash 1017 on local hardware but then it turns out it's something like the unsloth Q2 XXS or similar size. The Q8 is 508GB so assuming for a moment we're not running it on a Mac, we're looking at a cost of five or six 96GB GPUs to load the whole thing with a good sized full context and KV cache.

Haven't bothered with DS4.1 personally but I've seen reports of running it with native weights on 4x DGX Sparks. Currently ~$30k but last month that setup was ~$20k.

4x 96 GB runs the NVFP4 quants, which are indistinguishable from Q8 in real-world performance for this particular model. That's not always true but DeepSeek is unusually quantization-friendly. Also remember that a big chunk of the model consists of engrams that can live in system RAM or even on an SSD if necessary.

I imagine the various GGUFs are still pretty impressive, but haven't tried them myself.