Please report anything you find. Bad output, crashes, wrong metadata, a better flag for a particular card — open a discussion here or reach me at @ItsmeAjayKV.

Files

File	Size	What it is	Status
`Qwen3.8-27B-gdn8-q6attn-iq3ffn.gguf`	13.6 GB (12.7 GiB) / 3.99 bpw	Role mix. GDN state Q8, attn Q6, mid-FFN IQ3_XXS. See below.	up
`Qwen3.8-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf`	~16–18 GB	Flat K-quant, if I bake one from the same BF16	waiting
`Qwen3.8-27B-Q5_K_M.gguf`	~19–20 GB	Same	waiting
`Qwen3.8-27B-imatrix-v6.gguf`	~14 MB	Imatrix used for the mix. Reusable.	maybe

This is not a flat IQ3_XXS. Only the mid-FFN tensors are IQ3_XXS. The filename is the recipe.

Download (CLI)

hf download hf://aj9o9/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF/Qwen3.8-27B-gdn8-q6attn-iq3ffn.gguf

That pulls just the mix, into the current directory. Same thing, older-style:

hf download aj9o9/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF --include "Qwen3.8-27B-gdn8-q6attn-iq3ffn.gguf"

Imatrix (only if you want to requant, not needed to run):

hf download hf://aj9o9/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF/Qwen3.8-27B-imatrix-v6.gguf

Rule of thumb I actually use: pick the largest quant that fits in RAM/VRAM, not the largest one you can download.

Should you use the mix?

Take this if you want ~13G and you care more about keeping attention / GDN state fat than a uniform 3-bit file.

Skip this if you can hold Unsloth UD-Q3_K_XL (13.4G) or a Q4. Those beat it on every number I ran. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What the mix actually is

Official BF16 → my my-mix.txt + bartowski's Qwen3.8 calibration-v6.

Role	Type
GDN state (`ssm_*` except out)	Q8_0
Full attention Q/K/V/O, embed, output, MTP	Q6_K
GDN mixers (`attn_qkv`, `attn_gate`, `ssm_out`)	Q4_K
FFN edge (layers 0–3, 60–63)	IQ3_S
FFN mid (everything else `ffn_*`)	IQ3_XXS
norms	F32

Imatrix: bartowski calibration-v6, rendered through this model's chat template. 583 chunks at -c 512, --parse-special --process-output. About 63% of that file is tool-call text. I did not use wiki-only calib.

Needs a recent llama.cpp with qwen35. Old trees will not load it.

Numbers I actually measured

Same box, same llama.cpp, same prompts. Wiki KLD is vs official BF16 logits (wiki.test.raw, n_ctx=512). GLSL / hard is my locked suite, think off, t=0.

model	size	wiki KLD ↓	GLSL ↑	hard
Unsloth Q4_K_M	16G	0.015	0.946	6/6
Unsloth UD-Q3_K_XL	13.4G	0.031	0.922	6/6
bartowski Q3_K_S	13.7G	0.070	0.892	5/6
this mix	13.6 GB	0.073	0.863	5/6
Unsloth Q5_K_M	19G	0.006	0.855	5/6
bartowski IQ3_M	13.9G	0.057	0.831	5/6

Read it like this:

If you have 16G+, take Q4.
If you want the best 13G-class file I measured, take Unsloth UD-Q3_K_XL, not mine.
This mix beats bartowski IQ3_M on GLSL (0.863 vs 0.831) at a slightly smaller size, and it beats Unsloth Q5 on GLSL at 6G less. That is the honest reason it exists.
Hard: I fail lfu_cache. Q4 and UD-Q3 pass all six. I am not going to hide that.
Tools (single-shot + short agent loops) were a tie. Everyone passed the easy set. I will not claim a tools win.

Wiki KLD is English Wikipedia. The imatrix is chat + tools. Those two will not rank the same, and they didn't.

How I run it

bash

llama-server \
  -m Qwen3.8-27B-gdn8-q6attn-iq3ffn.gguf \
  --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8080 \
  -ngl 999 -fa on --jinja \
  -np 1 -t 12 \
  --alias qwen38-27b-gdn8 \
  --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 \
  --spec-type draft-mtp \
  -c 24576

From the Hub:

bash

llama-server \
  --hf-repo aj9o9/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF \
  --hf-file Qwen3.8-27B-gdn8-q6attn-iq3ffn.gguf \
  -ngl 999 -fa on --jinja \
  --spec-type draft-mtp \
  --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 \
  -c 24576

MTP tensors are in the file (Q6_K). --spec-type draft-mtp is optional; it drafts, it does not change quality.

Official sampling from the Qwen card:

Thinking: temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, top_k=20
Instruct / no-think: temperature=0.7, top_p=0.80, top_k=20, presence_penalty=1.5

I graded the table above at t=0, think off, so I could actually compare quants.

Hardware this was made on


GPU	RTX 3090 24 GB
System RAM	64 GB
Runtime	llama.cpp `master`, arch `qwen35`

The mix is meant to leave room for context on a 24 GB card. A 16 GB card can load the weights; keep -c honest.

Vision: this GGUF is text weights only. If you want the encoder, grab an mmproj from the official convert or from bartowski/unsloth and pass --mmproj. I have not tested that pairing.

About the model

27B dense, hybrid 16 × (3 GDN + 1 full attn), 64 layers + MTP
hidden 5120, native 262k context
thinking on by default in the official template

See Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B for the real model card. Their numbers are BF16, not this file.

License

Apache 2.0, same as Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B. LICENSE is in this repo.

Disclaimer

Not affiliated with Alibaba, Qwen, Unsloth, or bartowski. Provided as-is. Use the official card for intended use, safety, and limitations.

aj9o9/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF

Qwen3.8-27B GGUF

A note from me