With Strata, things have gotten more flexible. Similar optimizations are coming to llama.cpp eventually.
https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata/blob/main/docs/MODELS.md#pick-by-memory
It says Qwen 3.8 Flash Next can run with just 8GB VRAM and 96GB RAM for a good quant of it. This is a really good model, and the new version 4 should be coming in the next month or so, probably the same size but smarter.
DeepSeek v4.1 Flash is probably even smarter, says it needs 12+GB VRAM and 64GB of RAM. For decent speed I think you'll want at least 32GB VRAM and 256GB RAM for this one. 96GB VRAM should be very good.
You're gonna have big diminishing returns chasing for even bigger models, partly because Strata doesn't support anything bigger and llama.cpp is currently not nearly as optimized. There might be an inference engine I don't know about for the biggest models.
