I'm using Qwen 3.8 27B with Unsloth's UD-Q4_K_XL quantization[0] via llama.cpp with 131k context - full command line:

llama-server --model Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --ctx-size 131072 --parallel 1 --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080 --spec-type draft-dflash --spec-draft-model dflash-Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_0.gguf --spec-draft-n-max 3 --spec-draft-type-k q8_0 --spec-draft-type-v q8_0 --mmproj mmproj-BF16.gguf --no-mmproj-offload --image-min-tokens 2048 --reasoning-preserve

It just barely fits in my RX 7900 XTX's 24GB of VRAM (TBH i'm not sure if dflash is much better than MTP - which is included as part of the GGUF - and MTP saves ~1GB of VRAM). I'm using Linux with Xorg/Window Maker as my DE so it uses no VRAM at all (Qt-based stuff - and i guess modern Gtk too - tend to use some VRAM for themselves, even opening Kate shows up in amdgpu_top :-P). The above gives me on average ~50 tokens/sec generation (drops to about 35 when the context is close to full) and ~700 tokens/sec prompt processing, which while not particularly speedy is fine for agentic stuff as i just give the AI a task and leave it in the background doing things. To save some VRAM i run the multimodal projector for vision on the CPU (the --no-mmproj-offload) and only one task is ever executed at the same time (--parallel 1). Also the kvcache is quantized to q8_0 - supposedly this makes the model a bit dumber, though the extra VRAM needed for the full f16 kvcache makes it more than ten times slower :-P (and AFAIK dense models like the 27B aren't as affected by it as MoE models are).

I'm using Pi[1] (a slightly older version that i've had remain offline and disabled the telemetry) for now (will replace it at some point since i'm not a fan of the ~500MB dependency tree, the almost-dark patterns for online access/telemetry and the increasingly worrying push for the devs' services, but i do like how it approaches compaction and that for the most part it doesn't need any handholding when some error happens - which is ideal for "let the AI do something and check it some time later").

It is running inside a container so it doesn't get any access to my real stuff (mainly to avoid the LLM making any mess - of which it sometimes does in the container, but well, it is contained :-P). In the container Pi gives the LLM some basic tools - read, write, edit and bash - and the last one is basically used to do most of the work (i've also made a bunch of tools the LLM can use via the CLI).

[0] https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF/blob/main/Qw...

[1] https://pi.dev/

Five Qwen3.8-27B models match Fable 5 Using GVS5H Harness