Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Bigger Quants Beat Smaller Even in VRAM-Limited Scenarios — Challenges Conventional Wisdom

r/LocalLLaMA·medium signal

r/LocalLLaMA benchmarks (241 upvotes) demonstrate that Qwen3.6-35B-A3B performs better with larger quantizations even when VRAM is constrained, challenging the standard advice of using smaller quants to fit more of the model in GPU memory. The finding suggests that for MoE architectures with selective expert activation, quality-per-active-parameter matters more than cramming the full model into available VRAM — a practical insight for anyone running local models on consumer hardware.