> even Qwen 27B running from RAM will be much faster than any Deepseek V4 model with SSD offloading.
If you have reasonable amounts of RAM to cache the most likely experts, that's not true at all. Qwen 27B is marginally faster on a nearly empty context, then falls behind as context length increases due to the different attention mechanisms. Prefill for Qwen is much faster, but you're still comparing vastly different model sizes and capabilities. DeepSeek Flash is the best deal overall.
> completely fit in a high-end consumer or mid-end pro GPU
Or you could fit the dense portion of a much more capable model and still take advantage of that hardware.
If you have reasonable amounts of RAM to cache the most likely experts, that's not true at all. Qwen 27B is marginally faster on a nearly empty context, then falls behind as context length increases due to the different attention mechanisms. Prefill for Qwen is much faster, but you're still comparing vastly different model sizes and capabilities. DeepSeek Flash is the best deal overall.
> completely fit in a high-end consumer or mid-end pro GPU
Or you could fit the dense portion of a much more capable model and still take advantage of that hardware.