Home / Can I run it? / R1 Distill 7B / R1 Distill 7B on an RTX 3070 Ti

Yes. R1 Distill 7B at Q4_K_M needs about 6.3 GB, and the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti has 8.0 GB usable at a ~4k context.

Can I run R1 Distill 7B on an RTX 3070 Ti?

R1 Distill 7B at Q4_K_M needs about 6.3 GB, and the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti has 8.0 GB usable. That figure is 8 GB of VRAM on the spec sheet, of which 8.0 GB is usable for weights and cache, at 608 GB/s memory bandwidth. A 7B DeepSeek-R1 distill on Qwen. It is a reasoning-tuned small model, not the full 671B R1. These are estimates from our formula, not measured benchmarks.

Quant that fits

Q4_K_M Fits with headroom

Memory needed

6.3 GB at Q4_K_M, ~4k context

Usable VRAM

8.0 GB of 8 GB VRAM

Est. tokens/sec

79–112 estimate

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B · GeForce RTX 3070 Ti · Everything this machine runs · Q4 vs Q8 vs FP16

Memory at each quant

Estimated tokens per second

Estimate: 79–112 tokens/sec at Q4_K_M. This is a bandwidth-derived range, not a bench. Efficiency is a 60–85% GPU band from How we calculate.

Context headroom

At Q4_K_M, this machine has headroom out to about 32k tokens under our KV estimate. Longer chats need more memory for the cache. Figures assume an FP16 KV cache.

From the model’s config. Try other sizes in the VRAM calculator or see the context length guide.

What to do instead

• Q8_0 needs 10.3 GB and does not fit here. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has 11.0 GB usable, enough for Q8.
• See the best GPU for this model family and the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B model page.

Other hardware for R1 Distill 7B

• R1 Distill 7B on an RTX 3060 12GBFits
• R1 Distill 7B on an RTX 4090Fits
• R1 Distill 7B on an Arc B580Fits
• R1 Distill 7B on a Mac mini 16GBFits

Other models on an RTX 3070 Ti

• Qwen3-32B on an RTX 3070 TiWon’t fit
• Qwen3-30B-A3B on an RTX 3070 TiWon’t fit
• Qwen3.8-27B on an RTX 3070 TiWon’t fit
• Gemma 3 27B on an RTX 3070 TiWon’t fit
• Gemma 4 31B on an RTX 3070 TiWon’t fit
• gpt-oss-20b on an RTX 3070 TiWon’t fit