How fast will Qwen3 30B A3B feel on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5)?

Qwen3 30B A3B on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5)

Qwen3 30B A3B is a 30.53B-parameter mixture-of-experts model (3.3B active per token). At Q4_K_M it needs about 19.3 GB of memory. The CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5) has 89 GB usable, so it fits entirely in memory. Expect about 30 tokens/sec (25–34), with the first token after 0.4 s for a short prompt. This estimate is projected from the hardware specs; no benchmarks exist yet.

Speed by quantization

Quantization	File size	Memory	Generation	First token	Source
Q4_K_M	18.6 GB	Fits	30 tok/s	0.4 s	Projected
Q8_0	32.5 GB	Fits	17 tok/s	0.4 s	Projected
FP16	61.1 GB	Fits	9.0 tok/s	0.4 s	Projected

Qwen3 30B A3B on other hardware

H200 141GB (cloud) · 744 tok/s at Q4_K_M
H100 80GB (cloud) · 519 tok/s at Q4_K_M
A100 80GB (cloud) · 316 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512GB · 282 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5090 32GB · 278 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 96GB · 278 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 7900 XTX 24GB · 274 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 7900 XT 20GB · 222 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB · 193 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 32GB · 184 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 4090 24GB · 156 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 3090 24GB · 145 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · 144 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB · 128 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook M3 Max 48GB · 94 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB · 93 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5080 16GB · 87 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti 16GB · 84 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB · 75 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB (Strix Halo) · 73 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB · 72 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Mini M4 Pro 64GB · 64 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16GB · 62 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Intel Arc Pro B70 32GB · 58 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 4070 12GB · 51 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · 46 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA DGX Spark 128GB · 42 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook M4 Pro 24GB · won't run
MacBook M2 Pro 16GB · won't run

Other models on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5)

Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B · 3.6 tok/s at Q4_K_M
GLM-5.3 Flash · 14 tok/s at UD-IQ1_S
GPT-OSS 20B · 29 tok/s at MXFP4
Gemma 4 26B A4B · 24 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3B · 33 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Ornith 1.5 35B A3B · 33 tok/s at Q4_K_M
DeepSeek V4 Flash · 15 tok/s at UD-IQ1_M
GPT-OSS 120B · 22 tok/s at MXFP4
Gemma 4 31B · 3.3 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Llama 3.1 8B · 10 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Qwen 3.5 9B · 10 tok/s at Q4_K_M
DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B · 6.6 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Ornith 1.5 9B · 10 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Muse Glimmer 30B · 3.0 tok/s at Q4_K_M

All models on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5) · Qwen3 30B A3B on all 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.