DeepSeek-R1 (70B Distill) has 70.6 billion parameters. At standard 4-bit quantization with 8K context, it needs roughly 49.3 GB of VRAM — weights plus cache and runtime overhead.

VRAM by quantization

PrecisionWeightsCache/BufferTotal VRAM
2-bit (IQ2_XXS)22.6 GB8.5 GB33.1 GB
4-bit (Q4_K_M)38.8 GB8.5 GB49.3 GB
8-bit (Q8_0)74.1 GB8.5 GB84.6 GB
16-bit (FP16)141.2 GB8.5 GB151.7 GB

Which GPU can run DeepSeek-R1 (70B Distill) (at 4-bit)?

GPU classVRAMDeepSeek-R1 (70B Distill) (49.3 GB)
8 GB · RTX 5060 / 40608 GBWon’t fit
12 GB · RTX 5070 / 306012 GBWon’t fit
16 GB · RTX 5070 Ti / 408016 GBWon’t fit
24 GB · RTX 4090 / 309024 GBWon’t fit
32 GB · RTX 509032 GBWon’t fit
48 GB · 2×24 / RTX 6000 Ada48 GBTight
128 GB · M-series / RTX Spark128 GBFits

Llama-based reasoning distill with advanced chain-of-thought.

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VRAM figures are reproducible estimates (weights + KV cache + overhead) and vary by runtime and quant format. Data current as of 2026-06-15.