Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B on RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation (96 GB, 300 W)

30.532B (3.3B active) on 96 GB at 1,792 GB/s. Hardware details · Model details

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Yes. Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B fits on RTX PRO 6000 Max-Q workstation (96 GB, 300 W) at the recommended Q8_0 configuration, requiring approximately 33.5 GB at 8K context. Practical context capacity is 256K. Expected decode for the recommended configuration is ~210–303 t/s. Estimated
CompatibilityComfortable
Calculated fit
Yes
Calculated Uses under 80% of usable memory. Room for a long context and other work.
Recommended quantization
Q8_0
Calculated gguf
Memory required
33.5 GB
Calculated of 88.3 GB usable — 38%
Max practical context
256K
Calculated model supports 256K

Memory budget at 8K context

Model weights ⓘ
30.8 GB Calculated
KV cache ⓘ
0.8 GB Calculated
Runtime overhead ⓘ
1.9 GB Estimated
Total required
33.5 GB Calculated
Headroom ⓘ
54.8 GB Calculated
Highest-precision quantization that leaves headroom: uses 38% of usable memory at 8K context.
Discrete GPU: 96 GB of VRAM, of which we assume 92% is usable after driver and context overhead.
Mixture of experts: all 30.532B parameters must be resident in memory even though only ~3.3B are active per token. Memory follows total parameters; speed follows active parameters.
Performance

Estimated performance · recommended Q8_0

Decode, prefill and TTFT below are estimates for Q8_0. We do not have a comparable Q8_0 measurement on this machine.

Estimated decode
~210–303 t/s
Estimated Q8_0; calculated range
Estimated prefill
~2650–5510 t/s
Estimated Q8_0; calculated range
Estimated TTFT at 8K
~1.5–3.2 s
Estimated Q8_0; calculated range
Hardware load reference
390 W
Measured machine-level load; not this model run
How the estimate is calculated
  1. Decode: reading 3.3B active parameters at 8.50 bits/weight takes 2.63 ms at 1792 GB/s x 74% 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: 190 TFLOPS (FP16) x 2 for native FP8 tensor cores x 0.67 calibrated against measured prefill on this platform x 32% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 10.0B parameters per token.
  5. Prefill uses 10.0B effective parameters, not the 3.3B 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.

Submit a benchmarkSubmissions stay pending until reviewed.
This model at other quantizations on this machine
QuantizationResidentDiskTotal neededUtilisationFitMax context
Q4_K_M17.8 GB17.8 GB20.0 GB23%Comfortable256K
Q5_K_M20.8 GB20.8 GB23.2 GB26%Comfortable256K
Q8_0recommended30.8 GB30.8 GB33.5 GB38%Comfortable256K
BF1656.9 GB56.9 GB60.3 GB68%Comfortable256K
Cost of running Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B on this machineUnited States (federal) · C corporation · 8h/day
Monthly economic cost
$138
Calculated after tax
Codex/Claude Code
$100/mo
≈ $100/mo · local is $38 more
Net cash at purchase
$10,809
Calculated VAT not reclaimable
Total over 5 years
$8,294
Calculated after tax, after resale
Cost per USD/1M tokens
$4.25
Calculated 32.5M 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: $10,809 in United States (federal), tax/VAT excluded · estimated · NL workstation integrator (converted catalogue estimate). This is the localized purchase input; the after-tax economic cost is calculated separately below.

Monthly breakdown

Depreciation
9,188 over 5 years, straight-line to a 1,621 residual
$153.13
Electricity
20.1 kWh/month at 0.140/kWh
$2.81
Cost of capital
4.0%/yr on 6,215 average capital employed
$20.72
Monthly cost before tax$176.65
Electricity tax shield
Running costs are deductible business expenses
−$0.59
First-year expensing
§179 (100.0%)
−$37.83
Monthly economic cost after tax$138.23

Three different numbers, deliberately

Cash cost
$10,809
Money that leaves the bank account on day one, net of reclaimable VAT.
Accounting depreciation
$153.13/month
$9,188 written down over 5 years to a $1,621 residual.
After-tax economic cost
$138.23/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
$1,621 (15%) Assumption
Two GPU generations later, the card is worth a fraction of its list price.
Electricity
$0.140/kWh Assumption
Average power draw
114 W Calculated
Load 390 W for 20% of powered hours, idle 45 W for the rest — a machine that is on is not generating tokens the whole time.
Investment allowances
§179 100.0% Official spec
Worth $2,270 in total — first-year expensing that replaces later tax depreciation.
Cost of capital
$20.72/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
23.7 t/s
Calculated purchase price only
Decode per $100/month
185.6 t/s
Calculated after-tax ownership cost
Tokens per joule
2.25
Calculated same as tokens/s per watt
USD per 1M output tokens
$4.25
Calculated at 20% utilisation
Local versus hosted APIs
Hosted modelUSD/1M outputBreak-evenAPI at your volumeVerdictComparison type
Qwen3.8 Flash
Alibaba Cloud
$0.4289.8M/mo$50API cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek-V4.1 Flash
DeepSeek
$0.6076.8M/mo$59API cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek-V4 Pro
DeepSeek
$1.9819.0M/mo$236Local cheaperDifferent model
DeepSeek V4 Pro (Together)
Together AI
$4.406.5M/mo$689Local cheaperDifferent model
GLM-5.3
Z.ai
$4.408.9M/mo$507Local cheaperDifferent model
Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic
$5.0010.6M/mo$423Local 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 $138/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.