DeepSeek-V4 Flash on NVIDIA DGX Spark 128 GB

304.18B (13B active) on 128 GB at 273 GB/s. Hardware details · Model details

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Yes. DeepSeek-V4 Flash fits on NVIDIA DGX Spark 128 GB at the recommended DS4 Q2 (mixed) configuration, requiring approximately 85.1 GB at 8K context. Practical context capacity is 192K. Measured evidence: 18.05 t/s median across 1 comparable run at DS4 Q2 (mixed) and 2K context. Measured
CompatibilityFits
Calculated fit
Yes
Calculated Uses 80-90% of usable memory. Works, with limited headroom.
Recommended quantization
DS4 Q2 (mixed)
Calculated gguf
Memory required
85.1 GB
Calculated of 105.0 GB usable — 81%
Max practical context
192K
Calculated model supports 1M
Observed resident fit: DS4 Q2 (mixed) with eng_dwarfstar at 64K context. This is measured evidence for those exact artifacts and settings; it does not change the standard memory calculation above.

Memory budget at 8K context

Model weights ⓘ
81.0 GB Measured
KV cache ⓘ
0.7 GB Calculated
Runtime overhead ⓘ
3.4 GB Estimated
Total required
85.1 GB Calculated
Headroom ⓘ
19.9 GB Calculated
Fits with limited headroom (81% of usable memory). A longer context will not leave room for much else.
Unified LPDDR: the accelerator allocates from the same 128 GB pool as the OS. We assume 82% is available to the inference engine.
Mixture of experts: all 304.18B parameters must be resident in memory even though only ~13B are active per token. Memory follows total parameters; speed follows active parameters.
Performance

Measured performance · recommended DS4 Q2 (mixed)

Decode, prefill and TTFT below are measured for DS4 Q2 (mixed), the recommended configuration.

Medium6/10
Measured decode
18.1 t/s
Measured single measurement
Measured prefill
826 t/s
Measured single measurement
TTFT at 8K
0.07 s
Measured median time to first token
Hardware load reference
170 W
Measured machine-level load; not this model run

Measurement evidence

4 measured runs

Rows are kept separate when quantization, runtime, context, workload or execution settings differ.

QuantEngineDecode modeContextRunsMedian decodeMedian prefillLatestSources
DS4 Q2 (mixed)DwarfStar bd66c402070042bf0a79ad6ece8242de4c93680cstandard2K118.05 t/s826 t/s6 Sept 2026github.com
DS4 Q2 (mixed)DwarfStar bd66c402070042bf0a79ad6ece8242de4c93680cstandard16K115.10 t/s872 t/s6 Sept 2026github.com
DS4 Q2 (mixed)DwarfStar bd66c402070042bf0a79ad6ece8242de4c93680cstandard32K114.43 t/s856 t/s6 Sept 2026github.com
DS4 Q2 (mixed)DwarfStar bd66c402070042bf0a79ad6ece8242de4c93680cstandard64K113.84 t/s823 t/s6 Sept 2026github.com
How the estimate is calculated
  1. Decode: reading 13.0B active parameters at 2.29 bits/weight takes 20.34 ms at 273 GB/s x 67% achieved efficiency.
  2. MoE routing penalty of 15% applied: expert gathers are less bandwidth-efficient than a dense sweep.
  3. Prefill: 125 TFLOPS (FP16) x 4 for native FP4 tensor cores x 0.85 calibrated against measured prefill on this platform x 18% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 62.9B parameters per token.
  4. Prefill uses 62.9B effective parameters, not the 13B active in decode: a batch of hundreds of tokens routes across most of the expert pool.

  • MoE decode depends on how well the engine batches expert gathers; real results vary more than for dense models.
  • Prefill throughput is highly engine-dependent. Flash attention, batch size and quantized KV all move this number substantially, and for sparse mixture-of-experts models it is the least reliable figure we produce.
  • This is a calculated estimate, not a measurement. It assumes a single request, a short prompt, no speculative decoding and a warm model already resident in memory.

Estimator version estimator_v1. Stored with every estimated row so old estimates can be regenerated when the model improves.

Why this is rated "Medium" confidence
  • First-party reproducible benchmark: +4
  • 1 measurement: +0
  • Single measurement — agreement cannot be assessed: +0
  • Complete run metadata (engine, version, context, source, date): +2

Score 6/10. Aggregated with the median, not the mean, so one outlier cannot move the headline figure.

This model at other quantizations on this machine
QuantizationResidentDiskTotal neededUtilisationFitMax context
DS4 Q2 (mixed)recommended81.0 GB81.0 GB85.1 GB81%FitsResident run observed192K
Q4_K_M176.9 GB176.9 GB183.9 GB175%Does not fit0
Q5_K_M207.5 GB207.5 GB215.4 GB205%Does not fit0
Q8_0307.0 GB307.0 GB317.9 GB303%Does not fit0
Cost of running DeepSeek-V4 Flash on this machineUnited States (federal) · C corporation · 8h/day
Monthly economic cost
$52
Calculated after tax
Codex/Claude Code
$100/mo
≈ $100/mo · local is $48 less
Net cash at purchase
$3,873
Calculated VAT not reclaimable
Total over 5 years
$3,091
Calculated after tax, after resale
Cost per USD/1M tokens
$22.53
Calculated 2.3M tokens/month

The $100 comparison uses the Codex Pro 5x / Claude Max 5x plans. A fixed planning conversion is used for USD. This compares monthly spend only: subscriptions have usage limits, local hardware has different capabilities and constraints, and taxes or regional pricing may change the charged amount. Prices checked 7 September 2026.

Purchase-price input: $3,873 in United States (federal), tax/VAT excluded · estimated · NVIDIA / partner resellers (converted catalogue estimate). This is the localized purchase input; the after-tax economic cost is calculated separately below.

Monthly breakdown

Depreciation
3,408 over 5 years, straight-line to a 465 residual
$56.80
Electricity
9.5 kWh/month at 0.140/kWh
$1.33
Cost of capital
4.0%/yr on 2,169 average capital employed
$7.23
Monthly cost before tax$65.36
Electricity tax shield
Running costs are deductible business expenses
−$0.28
First-year expensing
§179 (100.0%)
−$13.55
Monthly economic cost after tax$51.52

Three different numbers, deliberately

Cash cost
$3,873
Money that leaves the bank account on day one, net of reclaimable VAT.
Accounting depreciation
$56.80/month
$3,408 written down over 5 years to a $465 residual.
After-tax economic cost
$51.52/month
Depreciation plus running costs plus cost of capital, less the tax those deductions save. This is the figure to compare between machines.
Assumptions and sources (verified 2026-09-07)
VAT rate
0% Official spec
VAT recoverable
0% Official spec
Federal C-corporation estimate at the flat 21% rate. Pass-through entities should use the sole-proprietor estimate as a rougher proxy.
Effective deduction rate
21.00% Calculated
Headline marginal rate 21.00%.
Depreciation
5 years, straight-line Assumption
Residual value
$465 (12%) Assumption
Extrapolated.
Electricity
$0.140/kWh Assumption
Average power draw
54 W Calculated
Load 170 W for 20% of powered hours, idle 25 W for the rest — a machine that is on is not generating tokens the whole time.
Investment allowances
§179 100.0% Official spec
Worth $813 in total — first-year expensing that replaces later tax depreciation.
Cost of capital
$7.23/month Assumption
Assumes the machine generates tokens 20% of its 176 powered hours per month. Cost per token scales inversely with this number — halve the utilisation and the cost per token doubles.
Federal planning estimate only, not tax advice. State and local income tax, sales/use tax and incentives are excluded. It assumes 100% business use, a Section 179 election, enough business income to use it, and that the full annual limit remains available.
Efficiency metrics
Decode per $1,000 spent
4.7 t/s
Calculated purchase price only
Decode per $100/month
35.0 t/s
Calculated after-tax ownership cost
Tokens per joule
0.33
Calculated same as tokens/s per watt
USD per 1M output tokens
$22.53
Calculated at 20% utilisation
Local versus hosted APIs
Hosted modelUSD/1M outputBreak-evenAPI at your volumeVerdictComparison type
Qwen3.8 Flash
Alibaba Cloud
$0.4233.5M/mo$4API cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash
DeepSeek
$0.6028.6M/mo$4API cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek-V4 Pro
DeepSeek
$1.987.1M/mo$17API cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek V4 Pro (Together)
Together AI
$4.402.4M/mo$48About equalDifferent model
GLM-5.3
Z.ai
$4.403.3M/mo$36API cheaperDifferent model
Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic
$5.004.0M/mo$30API cheaperDifferent model
Different-model comparison: the hosted model is not the model you would run locally. Treat this as a workload-quality trade-off, not a direct economic equivalence — the frontier model may complete a task in fewer tokens, or complete tasks the local model cannot. Break-even is the monthly output volume at which API spend equals the $52/month economic cost of owning this machine, assuming 8 input tokens per output token. Hosted prices are published in USD. This table is the canonical US default.