What can AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT run for reasoning?

Build: RX 9070 XT + Ryzen 7 9700X + 32GB DDR5 (Linux/ROCm)

Memory: 16 GB VRAM + 32 GB system RAM
Runner: llama.cpp (ROCm)

Runs comfortably
74 models

Ranked by fit for reasoning use case + predicted speed. Click a row for VRAM breakdown.

#1DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B
7B
deepseek
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 10.4 GBHeadroom: 5.6 GB
ollama run deepseek-r1:7b
84
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.70 GB
KV cache
3.50 GB
Activations
0.24 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
#2Llama 3.1 Nemotron Nano 8B
8B
llama
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 11.2 GBHeadroom: 4.8 GB
73
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.90 GB
KV cache
4.00 GB
Activations
0.25 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
#3RefinedNeuro RN TR R1
8B
llama
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 11.2 GBHeadroom: 4.8 GB
ollama run RefinedNeuro/RN_TR_R1:latest
73
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.90 GB
KV cache
4.00 GB
Activations
0.25 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
#4DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B
8B
deepseek
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 10.9 GBHeadroom: 5.1 GB
73
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.70 GB
KV cache
4.00 GB
Activations
0.24 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 11.8 GBHeadroom: 4.2 GB
65
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
5.00 GB
KV cache
4.50 GB
Activations
0.26 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
#6InternLM 2.5 7B Chat
7B
internlm
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 10.1 GBHeadroom: 5.9 GB
84
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.40 GB
KV cache
3.50 GB
Activations
0.23 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
#7Qwen 2.5 Math 7B
7B
qwen
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 4,096VRAM: 8.4 GBHeadroom: 7.6 GB
84
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.40 GB
KV cache
1.75 GB
Activations
0.22 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
#8Qwen 3 7B
7B
qwen
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 10.1 GBHeadroom: 5.9 GB
84
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.40 GB
KV cache
3.50 GB
Activations
0.23 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
#9EXAONE Deep 7.8B
7.8B
other
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 10.4 GBHeadroom: 5.6 GB
75
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.30 GB
KV cache
3.90 GB
Activations
0.22 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
#10RefinedNeuro RN TR R2
8B
llama
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 11.2 GBHeadroom: 4.8 GB
ollama run RefinedNeuro/RN_TR_R2:latest
73
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.90 GB
KV cache
4.00 GB
Activations
0.25 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
Quant: Q4_0Context: 8,192VRAM: 9.9 GBHeadroom: 6.1 GB
ollama run brooqs/mistral-turkish-v2:latest
87
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
4.10 GB
KV cache
3.60 GB
Activations
0.21 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 4,096VRAM: 7.8 GBHeadroom: 8.2 GB
84
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
3.90 GB
KV cache
1.75 GB
Activations
0.20 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB

Runs with tradeoffs
98 models

Tight VRAM, partial CPU offload, or context-limited.

DeepSeek V3 Lite (16B MoE)
16B
deepseek
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 2,048VRAM: 14.0 GBHeadroom: 2.0 GB
  • Tight VRAM fit — only 2.0 GB headroom left for context growth
244
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
9.50 GB
KV cache
2.00 GB
Activations
0.48 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
Phi-4 Reasoning 14B
14B
phi
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 2,048VRAM: 12.6 GBHeadroom: 3.4 GB
  • Tight VRAM fit — only 3.4 GB headroom left for context growth
ollama run phi4-reasoning:14b
42
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
8.40 GB
KV cache
1.75 GB
Activations
0.42 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B
14B
deepseek
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 2,048VRAM: 12.6 GBHeadroom: 3.4 GB
  • Tight VRAM fit — only 3.4 GB headroom left for context growth
ollama run deepseek-r1:14b
42
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
8.40 GB
KV cache
1.75 GB
Activations
0.42 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
Phi-4 14B
14B
phi
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 2,048VRAM: 12.6 GBHeadroom: 3.4 GB
  • Tight VRAM fit — only 3.4 GB headroom left for context growth
ollama run phi4:14b
42
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
8.40 GB
KV cache
1.75 GB
Activations
0.42 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
Nemotron 3 Nano 9B
9B
other
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 12.1 GBHeadroom: 3.9 GB
  • Tight VRAM fit — only 3.9 GB headroom left for context growth
65
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
5.30 GB
KV cache
4.50 GB
Activations
0.27 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
DeepSeek R1 Distill Mistral 24B
24B
deepseek
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 8,192VRAM: 28.7 GBHeadroom: 6.5 GB
  • Partial CPU offload: ~44% of layers run on CPU
  • CPU is the bottleneck — upgrading RAM bandwidth helps more than VRAM here
4
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
14.00 GB
KV cache
12.00 GB
Activations
0.71 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 2,048VRAM: 23.8 GBHeadroom: 11.4 GB
  • Partial CPU offload: ~33% of layers run on CPU
  • CPU is the bottleneck — upgrading RAM bandwidth helps more than VRAM here
4
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
17.10 GB
KV cache
3.88 GB
Activations
0.86 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB
DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B
32B
deepseek
Commercial OK
Quant: Q4_K_MContext: 2,048VRAM: 26.0 GBHeadroom: 9.2 GB
  • Partial CPU offload: ~38% of layers run on CPU
  • CPU is the bottleneck — upgrading RAM bandwidth helps more than VRAM here
ollama run deepseek-r1:32b
3
tok/s
Estimated
Weights
19.00 GB
KV cache
4.00 GB
Activations
0.95 GB
Runtime
2.00 GB

What if you upgraded?

Hypothetical scenarios. We re-ran the compatibility engine for each.

+32 GB system RAM

~$80–150

Doubles your CPU-offload working set. Helps when models don't quite fit in VRAM.

Unlocks: 64 new comfortable, 116 new tradeoff

  • Qwen 3 0.6B
  • Llama 3.2 3B Instruct
  • Qwen 3 1.7B
  • Gemma 3 270M

Upgrade to AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT

~$729

20 GB VRAM (vs your 16 GB) plus a bandwidth jump from ~644 GB/s to ~800 GB/s.

Unlocks: 86 new comfortable

  • Qwen 3 0.6B
  • Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
  • Gemma 4 12B
  • Qwen3.5 9B

Add a second AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT

~$649

Tensor parallelism splits the model across both cards, effectively doubling VRAM. Bandwidth doesn't double — runs ~1.5× the single-card speed in practice.

Unlocks: 141 new comfortable

  • Qwen 3 0.6B
  • Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
  • Qwen 3 30B-A3B
  • Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B Instruct

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Won't run
top 5 popular models

Need more memory than you have. Shown for orientation.

DeepSeek V4 Pro (1.6T MoE)
1600B
deepseek
Commercial OK

Even with CPU offload, needs more memory than your VRAM (16 GB) + 60% of system RAM (19 GB) combined.

Qwen 3.5 235B-A17B (MoE)
397B
qwen
Commercial OK

Even with CPU offload, needs more memory than your VRAM (16 GB) + 60% of system RAM (19 GB) combined.

Qwen 3 235B-A22B
235B
qwen
Commercial OK

Even with CPU offload, needs more memory than your VRAM (16 GB) + 60% of system RAM (19 GB) combined.

DeepSeek R1 (671B reasoning)
671B
deepseek
Commercial OK

Even with CPU offload, needs more memory than your VRAM (16 GB) + 60% of system RAM (19 GB) combined.

Llama 4 Scout
109B
llama
Commercial OK

Even with CPU offload, needs more memory than your VRAM (16 GB) + 60% of system RAM (19 GB) combined.

How to read these numbers

Measured here
Measured here - RunLocalAI ran this exact combo on owner hardware with public evidence.

Source-backed
Source-backed / community - a reproduced public source supports the speed, but it is not labeled as owner-measured.

Extrapolated
Extrapolated - predicted from a measured benchmark on similar-bandwidth hardware.

Estimated
Estimated - formula based on VRAM bandwidth and model architecture; not a benchmark row.

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