Can Surface Laptop Ultra · RTX Spark N1X (18-core) · 24 GB run Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B Instruct?
24 GB unified · 300 GB/s memory bandwidth · Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B Instruct has 30.5B parameters (3.3B active per token).
Short answer
It loads, but it's borderline even for chat.
Best quantization for chat: Q3_K_M (14 GB of weights) on Ollama. Generation: 60–100 tok/s, leaving about 0.0 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 | Borderline | Q3_K_M | 60–100 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
Speeds are bandwidth-based estimates; no direct benchmark exists for this pair. “First reply” is the time to read the workload’s opening prompt. How we calculate
Get it running
Copy-paste commands for the Q3_K_M build with a 8K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF:Q3_K_M
Downloads 14.71 GB (Q3_K_M). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=8192 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for Surface Laptop Ultra · RTX Spark N1X (18-core) · 24 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- gpt-oss-20b50–85 tok/sExcellent
- MiniCPM5 2B55–90 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B60–95 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 4B35–55 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 9B18–30 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 12B20–35 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B Instruct
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Laptop · Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (Radeon 890M) · 32 GB$1,300 · 20–35 tok/sComfortable
- Laptop · Core Ultra 7 258V (Arc 140V) · 32 GB$1,300 · 17–30 tok/sComfortable
- Mac mini M4 32 GB$1,399 · 25–35 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Ryzen 9 9950X (no GPU) · 64 GB DDR5$1,400 · 11–18 tok/sComfortable
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 32 GB RAM$1,500 · 60–95 tok/sExcellent
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 64 GB$1,600 · 50–65 tok/sExcellent
Same chip, other memory: 128 GB
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.