How fast will local models feel on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5)?

Local LLM speed on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5)

The CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5) has 96 GB of memory and 89.6 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is what mostly decides generation speed. Below is the expected speed for each model at the best quantization that fits.

ModelQuantizationMemoryGenerationFirst token
Qwen 3.6/3.8 27BQ4_K_MFits3.6 tok/s0.9 s
GLM-5.3 FlashUD-IQ1_SPartial offload14 tok/s2.0 s
GPT-OSS 20BMXFP4Fits29 tok/s0.4 s
Gemma 4 26B A4BQ4_K_MFits24 tok/s0.4 s
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3BQ4_K_MFits33 tok/s0.4 s
Ornith 1.5 35B A3BQ4_K_MFits33 tok/s0.4 s
DeepSeek V4 FlashUD-IQ1_MFits15 tok/s0.6 s
GPT-OSS 120BMXFP4Fits22 tok/s0.4 s
Gemma 4 31BQ4_K_MFits3.3 tok/s1.0 s
Llama 3.1 8BQ4_K_MFits10 tok/s0.5 s
Qwen 3.5 9BQ4_K_MFits10 tok/s0.5 s
DeepSeek R1 Distill 14BQ4_K_MFits6.6 tok/s0.6 s
Ornith 1.5 9BQ4_K_MFits10 tok/s0.5 s
Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_MFits3.0 tok/s1.0 s
Qwen3 30B A3BQ4_K_MFits30 tok/s0.4 s

Other hardware

Estimates for a short prompt on a single device. Measured numbers come from community benchmarks (r/LocalLLaMA, localscore.ai and more); others are derived from similar setups or projected from specs. Open source on GitHub.