How much VRAM does Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct need?

Q4_K_M is exactly 8,988,111,168 bytes (8.37 GiB) in weights. Add the KV cache, which depends on context length, plus roughly half a gigabyte of runtime overhead.

How large is Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct's KV cache?

6.00 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.

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Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct

unsloth/Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct

Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct at Q4_K_M is exactly 8,988,111,168 bytes (8.37 GiB / 8.99 GB) — an effective 4.868 bits per weight, not the nominal 4. Its KV cache at 32K is 6.00 GiB.

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

Parameters

14.8B

Architecture

qwen2

48 layers

Context

32,768

native (config.json)

License

other

Shipped quantizations

● exact bytes, summed from published files

Quant	Size●	Exact bytes●	Effective bpw●	Tensors●	Publisher
IQ2_M	4.99 GiB	5,356,147,008	2.901	—	liodon-ai
IQ3_M	6.44 GiB	6,916,538,688	3.746	—	liodon-ai
IQ4_XS	7.56 GiB	8,119,841,088	4.398	—	liodon-ai
Q4_K_M	8.37 GiB	8,988,111,168	4.868	—	liodon-ai
Q5_K_M	9.79 GiB	10,508,874,048	5.692	—	liodon-ai
Q6_K	11.29 GiB	12,124,684,608	6.567	—	liodon-ai
Q8_0	14.62 GiB	15,701,598,528	8.505	—	liodon-ai

KV cache by context

computed per layer

Context	KV cache (f16)●	Flat formula	Overstated by	Full / windowed / recurrent
4,096	0.75 GiB	0.75 GiB	—	48 / 0 / 0
8,192	1.50 GiB	1.50 GiB	—	48 / 0 / 0
16,384	3.00 GiB	3.00 GiB	—	48 / 0 / 0
32,768	6.00 GiB	6.00 GiB	—	48 / 0 / 0
65,536	12.00 GiB	12.00 GiB	—	48 / 0 / 0
131,072	24.00 GiB	24.00 GiB	—	48 / 0 / 0

Compare with

same modality, comparable size

vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct vs Qwen3.6-27B vs Qwen3.8-27B vs gemma-4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized vs gemma-4-E4B-it vs Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 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 7.74 GiB. The real file is 8.37 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

5120

Vocab

152,064

Sliding window

none

SWA period

—

MLA

Experts

—

Experts per token

—

use_sliding_window

false

Questions people ask

How much VRAM does Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct need?: Q4_K_M is exactly 8,988,111,168 bytes (8.37 GiB) in weights. Add the KV cache, which depends on your context length, plus roughly half a gigabyte of runtime overhead.
How large is Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct's KV cache?: 6.00 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 Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct 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.