Can Desktop PC · GeForce RTX 3090 · 64 GB RAM run Qwen3.5 35B-A3B?
24 GB VRAM + 64 GB RAM · 936 GB/s memory bandwidth · Qwen3.5 35B-A3B has 36B parameters (3B active per token).
Short answer
Yes, excellent for chat and acceptable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: Q4_K_M (21 GB of weights) on Ollama. Generation: 210–280 tok/s, leaving about 1.6 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 | Q4_K_M | 210–280 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Excellent | Q4_K_M | 200–270 tok/s | ≈1 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Acceptable | Q3_K_M | 210–290 tok/s | ≈3 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Acceptable | Q3_K_M | 200–270 tok/s | ≈4 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Excellent | Q3_K_M | 150–210 tok/s | ≈10 s | 64K | 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 Q3_K_M build with a 64K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF:Q3_K_M
Downloads 16.36 GB (Q3_K_M). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=65536 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for Desktop PC · GeForce RTX 3090 · 64 GB RAM
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B210–280 tok/sExcellent
- Gemma 4 26B-A4B140–190 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B300–410 tok/sExcellent
- GLM-4.7-Flash (30B-A3B)210–280 tok/sExcellent
- gpt-oss-20b≈150 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3 30B-A3B Instruct 2507150–200 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Qwen3.5 35B-A3B
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Mac mini M4 32 GB$1,399 · 30–45 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 · 70–120 tok/sExcellent
- Ryzen AI Max+ 395 mini PC / Framework Desktop · 64 GB$1,600 · 55–75 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc Pro B60 24GB · 64 GB RAM$1,628 · 70–120 tok/sExcellent
- Mac mini M2 Pro 32 GB$1,699 · 55–75 tok/sExcellent
Same chip, other memory: 32 GB
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.