Qwen3-Coder 30B A3B · 10 GPUs measured first-party · llama.cpp Q4_K_M · Updated July 2026

What GPU Do You Need for Qwen3-Coder 30B A3B?

Qwen3 Coder 30B-A3B is the coding-tuned version of the 30B MoE, and the fastest 'big' model in our entire database: 318 tok/s on the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell at just 110W. Same mixture-of-experts economics as its sibling (30B in memory, ~3B active per token), same ~20GB measured floor, measured on 10 GPUs with our pinned llama.cpp harness.

Benchmarked weights: bartowski/Qwen_Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF

The local coding agent, solved. Coding is the workload where generation speed matters most: agent loops burn thousands of tokens on edits, diffs and retries, and a slow model makes the whole loop unusable. That's why this model is significant: 30B-class code quality at 300+ tok/s means a local coding agent that keeps up with you. If I were building a local-first coding setup on a 24GB card today, this is the model I'd build it around.

The efficiency story is the headline. 318 tok/s at 110.5W is 2.87 tokens per watt, the best big-model efficiency figure we've measured. The H200 and H100 sit just behind (298 and 296 tok/s), and even the A10G holds 145 tok/s, which still beats every dense 32B result in our data on any GPU. The ~20GB floor puts it on 24GB consumer cards; pair it with the smaller Qwen2.5-Coder 7B as a fast autocomplete model and you have a full local coding stack on one card.

Our verdict

Qwen3 Coder 30B-A3B: 318 tok/s at 110W, the fastest big model we've benchmarked, full stop. MoE speed makes local coding agents actually viable, and the ~20GB floor fits any 24GB card. Our measurements, our harness, logged power on every run.

FAQ

What GPU do I need for Qwen3 Coder 30B-A3B?

A 24GB card. Measured peak was ~20GB at Q4_K_M. RX 7900 XTX, RTX 3090/3090 Ti, RTX 4090, or any datacenter card from the A10G up (145 tok/s there).

Why is it faster than models half its size?

Mixture-of-experts: only ~3B of the 30B parameters fire per token. In our data it out-generates the dense Qwen2.5-Coder 32B by almost 4× (318 vs 83 tok/s) in the same VRAM class.

Is it good enough to replace a cloud coding assistant?

Speed-wise, yes, 300+ tok/s is faster than most API endpoints deliver. Quality-wise it's the strongest local coding model we've benchmarked in this class; whether it replaces a frontier API model depends on your codebase's difficulty.

Qwen3 Coder 30B-A3B or Qwen2.5-Coder 32B?

The MoE, in almost every case: nearly 4× the generation speed in the same memory footprint. The dense 32B is the pick only if its outputs win on your specific code, for agent loops, speed compounds.

What's the best budget setup for it?

A used RTX 3090 (24GB) is the cheapest card that clears the floor with context headroom. For teams, one RTX PRO 6000 serves it at 318 tok/s and 110W, quiet, efficient, office-friendly.