Don't Sleep on EXL3 Quants

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA Tools

Summary

The author shares their experience running a 30B parameter model with EXL3 quantization on a 12GB VRAM GPU, achieving efficient performance and speed for coding and agent tasks.

I'm running Muse Glimmer 30B EXL3-SC 3.00bpw H4, fully resident on my 12GB VRAM GPU at 100K context with Q8\_O KV cache. It's a joy to use a dense 30B model at this size and still get \~30 tok/s on a VRAM-constrained laptop. It's supposed to be only slightly worse than the official 17GB K-quant at a much smaller footprint, and for my Hermes Agent use case I don't notice a quality difference. It's just much faster. I've tried Qwen 3.8 27B at SC2.20bpw H3 too. Definitely usable but I'm sticking with Unsloth UD\_Q4\_K\_XL for Qwen 3.8 27B because it's mainly for coding.
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