were you running the MoE models? those perform better speed wise

There is no way you would run a dense 27b model on that spec. I ran 3.6 27b on a 64gb ram, 24 gb vram, and it felt like the lower limit for this model with a decent context window.

If you want a better experience, maybe wait for either a moe model (like 3.6 35b A3) or a model with less parameters (like 9b). Qwen has been releasing those in the past, so maybe we’ll have them for 3.8 too.

I think (maybe I missed something) that identical size and quant versions of Qwen 3.5 and 3.8 should run at the same speed. It’s the exact same architecture.

Yes. mtplx runs it at 25 tok/sec on a M4 Max with 48GB RAM.

The author tested in on an M5 laptop too:

> It feels pretty slow on both the M5 Mac and the DGX Spark.

Dense ones like this are more bandwidth-hungry, so you want to try MoE ones like Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (35 Billion params but only 3 Billion Active) or Gemma 4. Unfortunately it seems like we might not be getting a 3.8 MoE.