gpt-oss-20b on RTX 5090 workstation (1x 32 GB)

20.915B (3.6B active) on 32 GB at 1,792 GB/s. Hardware details · Model details

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Yes. gpt-oss-20b fits on RTX 5090 workstation (1x 32 GB) at the recommended MXFP4 configuration, requiring approximately 13.0 GB at 8K context. Practical context capacity is 128K. Measured evidence: 419.14 t/s median across 1 comparable run at MXFP4 and 0 context. Measured
CompatibilityComfortable
Calculated fit
Yes
Calculated Uses under 80% of usable memory. Room for a long context and other work.
Recommended quantization
MXFP4
Calculated gguf
Memory required
13.0 GB
Calculated of 29.4 GB usable — 44%
Max practical context
128K
Calculated model supports 128K
Observed resident fit: MXFP4 with eng_llama_cpp at 0 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 ⓘ
11.3 GB Calculated
KV cache ⓘ
0.4 GB Calculated
Runtime overhead ⓘ
1.3 GB Estimated
Total required
13.0 GB Calculated
Headroom ⓘ
16.4 GB Calculated
Highest-precision quantization that leaves headroom: uses 44% of usable memory at 8K context.
Discrete GPU: 32 GB of VRAM, of which we assume 92% is usable after driver and context overhead.
Mixture of experts: all 20.915B parameters must be resident in memory even though only ~3.6B are active per token. Memory follows total parameters; speed follows active parameters.
Performance

Measured performance · recommended MXFP4

Decode, prefill and TTFT below are measured for MXFP4, the recommended configuration.

Low2/10
Measured decode
419 t/s
Measured single measurement
Measured prefill
—
Measured not reported
TTFT at 8K
~0.6–1.3 s
Estimated MXFP4; calculated range
Hardware load reference
640 W
Measured machine-level load; not this model run

Measurement evidence

1 measured run

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

QuantEngineDecode modeContextRunsMedian decodeMedian prefillLatestSources
MXFP4llama.cppstandard01419.14 t/s—30 Nov 2025github.com
How the estimate is calculated
  1. Decode: reading 3.6B active parameters at 4.25 bits/weight takes 1.35 ms at 1792 GB/s x 79% achieved efficiency.
  2. MoE routing penalty of 15% applied: expert gathers are less bandwidth-efficient than a dense sweep.
  3. Per-token overhead of 0.8 ms (kernel launches, attention bookkeeping, sampling) is significant here — this model is not purely bandwidth-bound on this hardware.
  4. Prefill: 210 TFLOPS (FP16) x 4 for native FP4 tensor cores x 0.71 calibrated against measured prefill on this platform x 32% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 8.7B parameters per token.
  5. Prefill uses 8.7B effective parameters, not the 3.6B 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.

Why this is rated "Low" confidence
  • Community-reported benchmark: +2
  • 1 measurement: +0
  • Single measurement — agreement cannot be assessed: +0
  • Incomplete run metadata: +0

Score 2/10. 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
MXFP4recommended11.3 GB11.3 GB13.0 GB44%ComfortableResident run observed128K
BF1639.0 GB39.0 GB41.5 GB141%Does not fit0
Cost of running gpt-oss-20b on this machineUnited States (federal) · C corporation · 8h/day
Monthly economic cost
$46
Calculated after tax
Codex/Claude Code
$100/mo
≈ $100/mo · local is $54 less
Net cash at purchase
$3,332
Calculated VAT not reclaimable
Total over 5 years
$2,731
Calculated after tax, after resale
Cost per USD/1M tokens
$0.86
Calculated 53.1M 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: $3,332 in United States (federal), tax/VAT excluded · estimated · NL retail (system build) (converted catalogue estimate). This is the localized purchase input; the after-tax economic cost is calculated separately below.

Monthly breakdown

Depreciation
2,832 over 5 years, straight-line to a 500 residual
$47.21
Electricity
32.4 kWh/month at 0.140/kWh
$4.53
Cost of capital
4.0%/yr on 1,916 average capital employed
$6.39
Monthly cost before tax$58.13
Electricity tax shield
Running costs are deductible business expenses
−$0.95
First-year expensing
§179 (100.0%)
−$11.66
Monthly economic cost after tax$45.51

Three different numbers, deliberately

Cash cost
$3,332
Money that leaves the bank account on day one, net of reclaimable VAT.
Accounting depreciation
$47.21/month
$2,832 written down over 5 years to a $500 residual.
After-tax economic cost
$45.51/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
$500 (15%) Assumption
Two GPU generations later, the card is worth a fraction of its list price.
Electricity
$0.140/kWh Assumption
Average power draw
184 W Calculated
Load 640 W for 20% of powered hours, idle 70 W for the rest — a machine that is on is not generating tokens the whole time.
Investment allowances
§179 100.0% Official spec
Worth $700 in total — first-year expensing that replaces later tax depreciation.
Cost of capital
$6.39/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
125.8 t/s
Calculated purchase price only
Decode per $100/month
921.0 t/s
Calculated after-tax ownership cost
Tokens per joule
2.28
Calculated same as tokens/s per watt
USD per 1M output tokens
$0.86
Calculated at 20% utilisation
Local versus hosted APIs
Hosted modelUSD/1M outputBreak-evenAPI at your volumeVerdictComparison type
Qwen3.8 Flash
Alibaba Cloud
$0.4229.6M/mo$82Local cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash
DeepSeek
$0.6025.3M/mo$96Local cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek-V4 Pro
DeepSeek
$1.986.3M/mo$386Local cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek V4 Pro (Together)
Together AI
$4.402.1M/mo$1,126Local cheaperDifferent model
GLM-5.3
Z.ai
$4.402.9M/mo$829Local cheaperDifferent model
Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic
$5.003.5M/mo$690Local 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 $46/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.