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Can the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB Run DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B at Q6_K?

Offload

Not entirely. DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B at Q6_K is a 26.9 GB download (Hugging Face file listing for bartowski/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B-GGUF), about 9.7 GB more than the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB's 17.2 GB (16 GiB), so the remainder has to be offloaded to system RAM. Generation speed is then set by system-memory and PCIe bandwidth rather than by the GPU, so no tokens-per-second figure is quoted for this pair. The smallest card in this matrix that holds it entirely is the RTX 5090 (32 GB).

Model file26.9 GBQ6_K
VRAM17.2 GB16 GiB · Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB
Headroom9.7 GB shortafter weights
Median speed—0 cited runs
Bandwidth ceiling~12 tok/s320 GB/s ÷ 26.89 GB

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Published runs for DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B on the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB

No published run for this pair has passed the checks yet.

More about this pair

How much VRAM does DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B need?

The Q6_K file is 26.9 GB. Add roughly 1.5 GB for the runtime and an ~8K-token context, so about 28.4 GB of VRAM holds it comfortably. Longer contexts grow the KV cache and need more.

What speed does DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B reach on the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB?

No published run of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B on the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB has been cited yet. Generation reads every weight once per token, so the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB's 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth divided by the 26.89 GB file puts the theoretical ceiling near 12 tokens per second once the whole model is resident. That is an upper bound, not a speed estimate: kernel, launch and compute overhead keep real runs below it.

Check another pair

See the full matrix → · All Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB benchmarks →

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32B (Q6_K) on other GPUs

Other models on the Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB

How the checks work

The fit is the Q6_K file size against the card's VRAM, with 1.5 GB kept for the runtime and an ~8K context. A published run counts only if the pair fits, the run is Q4-class, its source does not call it an estimate, it is under the bandwidth ceiling (memory bandwidth ÷ GB read per token: the whole file for a dense model, only the active experts' weights for a mixture-of-experts model such as gpt-oss-20b or Qwen3 30B-A3B, which is why those can post figures above bandwidth ÷ file size), it is not slower than the same card on a model twice its size, a single run is not slower than the same card on a larger dense model, and it is not one figure pasted across many cards. The whole matrix is downloadable as a CSV under CC BY 4.0.

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This page is editorial synthesis based on publicly available information. No independent first-party benchmarking is reported.