Best Local LLMs You Can Run on a Single 24GB GPU in 2026: Qwen, Gemma, Mistral, DeepSeek Compared

MarkTechPost · 1 month ago · 34

A guide compares six open-weight language models optimized for running on a single 24GB GPU, including Qwen3.6-27B, Gemma 4 26B, Mistral Small 3.2 24B, and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B. These models range from 20B to 35B parameters and use Q4_K_M quantization to fit within memory constraints while leaving room for context and inference overhead. The strategy shifts from squeezing the largest 70B models onto a card to running right-sized 20B–35B dense or efficient mixture-of-experts models that decode faster and leave 1–6GB of headroom for context and serving stack overhead.