Tip: Gemma 4 31B vs Qwen 3.5 27B — Practical Long Context Comparison for Local Deployment

r/LocalLLaMA·medium signal

An r/LocalLLaMA user running i7-12700K / RTX 3090 Ti / 96GB RAM compared Gemma 4 31B (Q4_K_XL) and Qwen 3.5 27B (Q5/Q6_K_XL) for long-context workflows. Key finding: Gemma 4 jumped from 13.5% to 66.4% on multi-needle retrieval (vs Gemma 3's essentially broken 128K context), making its 256K window actually usable. Qwen 3.5 wins on MMLU-Pro, GPQA Diamond, and LiveCodeBench text reasoning. Practical guidance: Gemma 4 for document-heavy agentic tasks, Qwen 3.5 for code generation and problem solving.