Qwen3.8 Flash Next on Dual used RTX 4090 workstation (48 GB)
180B (6B active) on 48 GB at 2,016 GB/s. Hardware details · Model details
Memory budget at 8K context
How the estimate is calculated
- Multi-GPU: 1008 GB/s per card, with each additional card contributing 40% of its bandwidth — 1411 GB/s effective, not the 2016 GB/s aggregate. Consumer Blackwell has no NVLink, so every layer's all-reduce crosses PCIe.
- Decode: reading 6.0B active parameters at 4.50 bits/weight takes 3.07 ms at 1411 GB/s x 78% achieved efficiency.
- MoE routing penalty of 15% applied: expert gathers are less bandwidth-efficient than a dense sweep.
- Per-token overhead of 1.4 ms (kernel launches, attention bookkeeping, sampling) is significant here — this model is not purely bandwidth-bound on this hardware.
- Prefill: 330 TFLOPS (FP16) x 4 for native FP4 tensor cores x 26% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 32.9B parameters per token.
- Prefill uses 32.9B effective parameters, not the 6B 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.
- With few active parameters on fast memory, fixed per-token overhead rather than bandwidth sets the ceiling. Real engines vary widely in how well they hide it.
- 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.
| Quantization | Weights | Total needed | Utilisation | Fit | Max context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
MLX 4-bitrecommended | 98.1 GB | 103.2 GB | 244% | Does not fit | 0 |
Q4_K_M | 104.7 GB | 110.0 GB | 260% | Does not fit | 0 |
Q8_0 | 181.7 GB | 189.3 GB | 448% | Does not fit | 0 |
BF16 | 335.3 GB | 347.5 GB | 823% | Does not fit | 0 |
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.
Monthly breakdown
| Depreciation 2,880 over 5 years, straight-line to a 812 residual | $48.00 |
| Electricity 47.9 kWh/month at 0.140/kWh | $6.70 |
| Cost of capital 4.0%/yr on 2,252 average capital employed | $7.51 |
| Monthly cost before tax | $62.21 |
| Electricity tax shield Running costs are deductible business expenses | −$1.41 |
| First-year expensing §179 (100.0%) | −$12.92 |
| Monthly economic cost after tax | $47.88 |
Three different numbers, deliberately
Assumptions and sources (verified 2026-09-07)
- VAT rate: No US federal VAT · verified 2026-09-07
- Marginal tax rate: IRS Publication 542 — Corporations · verified 2026-09-07
- VAT recoverable fraction: site assumption · verified 2026-09-07
- Useful life: IRS Publication 946 — How To Depreciate Property · verified 2026-09-07
- Electricity price: Site assumption · verified 2026-09-07
| Hardware | Decode | Price | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quad RTX 5090 workstation (4x 32 GB) | ~307–442 t/s | €13.999 | Borderline |
| Mac Studio M5 Ultra 256 GB | ~162–233 t/s | €9.599 | Comfortable |
| Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512 GB | ~101–145 t/s | €12.599 | Comfortable |
| Mac Studio M3 Ultra 256 GB | ~97.9–141 t/s | €6.299 | Comfortable |
| Mac Studio M5 Max 128 GB | ~97.9–141 t/s | €4.799 | Borderline |
| Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512 GB | ~58.9–84.7 t/s | €9.199 | Comfortable |
Compare Dual used RTX 4090 workstation (48 GB) against Used RTX 4090 workstation (24 GB) →
Page quality score (why this page is or is not indexed)
6/13 — marked noindex. Generated pages are gated so we do not ask a search engine to rank a page with nothing computed to say. The directive is emitted in the page head via the metadata API, not in the body, so it is authoritative.
- Has a memory-fit calculation (+3)
- Has a price (+2)
- Has an ownership economics calculation (+2)
- Well connected (18 internal links) (+1)
- No benchmark or estimate
- Model does not fit and there is no measurement to explain why it is worth knowing (-2)
- Fails a hard requirement: an indexable page needs both a compatibility calculation and at least one benchmark or estimate.