esatapedico's laboratory

Objective: you leave knowing which file to download for your card. Our lab publishes tiered NVFP4 versions of Qwen3.8-27B, from VERY-LOW to HIGHEST, plus two tiny tiers for small cards. Developers keep filing the same tickets. Here is the fix that held up for each, the measurement behind it, and what it costs. Symptom: fastest Qwen3.8 at home on a Blackwell card. True fix: the LOW tier. What does it cost? A few points of fidelity for a large multiple of speed. → A community member measured one hundred forty eight tokens per second on average with peaks near two hundred. The llm-bench aggregator recorded one run of our flagship file at one hundred thirty four tokens per second with quality near eighty seven. Perplexity testers measured the same files below plain Q4 at equal size. One wrote that every tested NVFP4 file was worse than his daily Q4 driver, and his follow-up landed at seven point four nine, still behind at equal speed. That is the whole deal.

Our Qwen3.8-27B files ship in tiers from VERY-LOW to HIGHEST, plus two tiny tiers for small cards. They look like nine separate releases. So what are you actually downloading when you pick one of our tiers? Nine releases is a lot of box art for ten changed tensors. The box is the product. — Assemblya “I just work here” The box is the product only if you never open it. The brackets differ, and that’s the point. LOW for speed, HIGH for the full head, BUDGET for one card. Download the rung you need.

Who runs Qwen3.8-27B at home wants a long document finished before their coffee cools. esatapedico’s NVFP4 quants promise that. The tiers run VERY-LOW to HIGHEST, with two no-draft tiers for sixteen gigabyte cards. The LOW tier is claimed as the fastest way to run this model. The metric backs the claim. One tester peaked near two hundred tokens per second, table here (https://gist.github.com/PierpaoloPernici/2e6f6f42965d531b364f39ab0e8a52ad). The same metric says the file scores worse than plain Q4 at equal size. A follow-up test matched Q4 on speed and still landed behind on perplexity, thread here (https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1w3wegw/). The quality gap is inherent to the quantization.

What was believed: the NVFP4 tiers were the fastest usable way to run Qwen3.8-27B at home. NVFP4 is a compressed format for running large models on consumer hardware. We published the files on HuggingFace from VERY-LOW to HIGHEST, and through late summer the community tested them. What happened: the confirmations arrived with numbers. PierpaoloPernice benchmarked the LOW tier at one hundred forty eight tokens per second on average. Tokens per second is words of generated text per second. Peaks reached near two hundred. He published the full table in a public gist. That means a long document finishes while the reader is still on the first page. The llm-bench aggregator recorded one run of the flagship file at one hundred thirty four tokens per second. Quality scored near eighty seven. Its answers page names the file first for agentic work. Strangers now arrive through a benchmark index instead of our links.

I’ve been posting model release updates as they happened. This collects everything through September in one place, organized by model family. From here on, I’ll post them as they go. Qwen3.6-27B Fable-Fusion NVFP4 Four tiers: LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH, VERY-HIGH. This is a splice of maci0’s native NVFP4 backbone (all 64 transformer blocks, no re-quantization round trip) and DavidAU’s low-memory heads, with the MTP speculative head embedded. Model credits: Alibaba Qwen, DavidAU, maci0. My part is the splice. ~640 t/s prefill, ~23 t/s decode on 2x16GB Blackwell. Apache-2.0.