The Best GPU for Llama 4 Scout in 2026 (VRAM-First, Honest)

Scout is mixture-of-experts, so you're buying for 109B in memory, not 17B active. The honest GPU ladder — why a 32GB card is the sweet spot, when… Aliteq Ravi Malhotra · Hardware Editor

It's a VRAM decision. MoE loads all 109B, so a quality Q4_K_M Scout is ~62GB — no single consumer GPU holds it. Buy memory capacity, not raw TFLOPs.

The honest best home pick is unified memory. A 96–128GB Strix Halo or Mac Studio holds a full Q4 Scout with context headroom — often cheaper than chasing VRAM with cards. This is the real answer.

A 32GB card (RTX 5090) runs Scout — but only at a low-bit quant (~33GB dynamic), which is fast but lossy. Great for speed, compromised on quality.

24GB cards (4090/3090) work only with CPU expert-offload at ~20 tok/s — tinkering, not daily driving. 16GB and below: run a smaller dense model instead.

Multi-GPU or an 80GB card holds a quality Q4, but the cost usually makes unified memory the smarter buy for Scout specifically.

Llama 4's headline feature is enormous context, but context isn't free: the KV cache grows with it, wanting roughly 1.5GB at 8k tokens, 6GB at 32k, and around 24GB at 128k — on top of the weights.…

Don't forget the KV cache

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