How much VRAM does Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-heretic need?

Q4_K_M is exactly 5,198,385,440 bytes (4.84 GiB) in weights. Add the KV cache, which depends on context length, plus roughly half a gigabyte of runtime overhead.

How large is Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-heretic's KV cache?

4.25 GiB at 32K context with an f16 cache, computed per layer from the model's architecture. Quantizing the cache to q8_0 roughly halves it.

coder3101 · vision language

Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-heretic

coder3101/Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-heretic

Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-heretic at Q4_K_M is exactly 5,198,385,440 bytes (4.84 GiB / 5.20 GB) — an effective 4.663 bits per weight, not the nominal 4. Its KV cache at 32K is 4.25 GiB.

From the file· summed from 1 file(s)From the file· KV per layer

Parameters

8.9B

Architecture

mistral3

34 layers

Context

262,144

native (config.json)

License

apache-2.0

Shipped quantizations

● exact bytes, summed from published files

Quant	Size●	Exact bytes●	Effective bpw●	Tensors●	Publisher
Q4_K_M	4.84 GiB	5,198,385,440	4.663	—	FadedRedStar
Q5_K_M	5.64 GiB	6,058,742,048	5.435	—	FadedRedStar
Q8_0	8.41 GiB	9,028,866,336	8.099	—	FadedRedStar

KV cache by context

computed per layer

Context	KV cache (f16)●	Flat formula	Overstated by	Full / windowed / recurrent
4,096	0.53 GiB	0.53 GiB	—	34 / 0 / 0
8,192	1.06 GiB	1.06 GiB	—	34 / 0 / 0
16,384	2.13 GiB	2.13 GiB	—	34 / 0 / 0
32,768	4.25 GiB	4.25 GiB	—	34 / 0 / 0
65,536	8.50 GiB	8.50 GiB	—	34 / 0 / 0
131,072	17.00 GiB	17.00 GiB	—	34 / 0 / 0

Compare with

same modality, comparable size

vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B vs Qwen3.6-27B-Fable-Fusion-711-Uncensored-Heretic-NM-DAU-MTP vs Qwen3.5-9B vs gemma-4-26B-A4B-it vs gemma-4-12B-it vs Qwen3.5-4B All alternatives →Will it fit on my card? →

Why other calculators give a different number

A parameters × bits ÷ 8 estimate puts Q4_K_M at roughly 4.67 GiB. The real file is 4.84 GiB, because a quantization is a mixture and some tensors are always kept at higher precision.

Architecture

from config.json

Layers

Attention heads

KV heads

Head dim

128

Hidden size

4096

Vocab

131,072

Sliding window

none

SWA period

—

MLA

Experts

—

Experts per token

—

use_sliding_window

—

Questions people ask

How much VRAM does Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-heretic need?: Q4_K_M is exactly 5,198,385,440 bytes (4.84 GiB) in weights. Add the KV cache, which depends on your context length, plus roughly half a gigabyte of runtime overhead.
How large is Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-heretic's KV cache?: 4.25 GiB at 32K context with an f16 cache, computed per layer. Quantizing the cache to q8_0 roughly halves it, which is often the difference between a context length fitting and not.
Which quantization of Ministral-3-8B-Reasoning-2512-heretic should I use?: Q4_K_M is the usual default. Pick the largest quantization that fits your card at the context you actually need — the table above gives exact sizes for every one published.