Can Desktop PC · RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell · 128 GB RAM run Qwen3 8B?
96 GB VRAM + 128 GB RAM · 1792 GB/s memory bandwidth · Qwen3 8B has 8.2B parameters.
Short answer
Yes, excellent for chat and acceptable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: Q6_K (6.5 GB of weights) on Ollama. Generation: 120–170 tok/s, leaving about 87 GB free for your other apps.
How it rates for each workload
Same model and machine, different jobs. Agents and long documents send far bigger prompts than chat, so they need much more speed and memory.
| Workload | Verdict | Quant | Generation | First reply | Context | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chatwith Open WebUI | Excellent | Q6_K | 120–170 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Comfortable | Q6_K | 120–160 tok/s | under 1 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Acceptable | Q8_0 | 80–110 tok/s | ≈2 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Acceptable | Q8_0 | 75–100 tok/s | ≈2 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Acceptable | Q8_0 | 70–95 tok/s | ≈4 s | 32K | Details |
Speeds are estimates calibrated against measured benchmarks on similar hardware. “First reply” is the time to read the workload’s opening prompt. How we calculate
Get it running
Copy-paste commands for the Q8_0 build with a 32K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Qwen3-8B-GGUF:Q8_0
Downloads 8.71 GB (Q8_0). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=32768 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for Desktop PC · RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell · 128 GB RAM
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B260–360 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct260–360 tok/sExcellent
- gpt-oss-120b≈180 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B210–280 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B260–360 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B530–720 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Qwen3 8B
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.