Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (Q5_K_S) — 15.4 GBon NVIDIA P100

Q5_K_S NVIDIA P100

Overview

Llama 3.3 70B Instruct is a 70B parameter dense language model by Meta, with code, multilingual, tool-calls capabilities. It supports a context window of up to 131,072 tokens.

Llama 3.3 70B Instruct is a 70-billion-parameter dense transformer model from Meta, optimized for instruction following, code generation, and multilingual conversation. It delivers performance competitive with larger models in the Llama family while remaining practical for single-node GPU deployments. The model supports tool calling and eight languages including English, French, Spanish, and German. With a 128K context window and grouped-query attention, it quantizes efficiently down to Q4 levels for self-hosted inference on consumer hardware.

At Q5_K_S quantization (medium quality tier), the model weighs 45.32 GB. This exceeds the 16 GB of VRAM on NVIDIA P100. Inference is still possible via CPU offload or memory-mapped loading from disk, but expect significantly reduced performance.

Hardware Requirements

Model size	45.32 GB
VRAM available	16 GB
VRAM used	15.4 GB
Min RAM required	31.7 GB
GPU layers	24 / 80
Context size	1,832
Backend	cuda12
Flash attention	Yes

Performance Notes

Reduced performance

56 of 80 layers run on CPU. Your system needs at least 31.7 GB RAM. If system RAM is insufficient, data will be read from disk on demand, with significant performance impact.

Shorter conversations

Context size has been reduced due to memory constraints. This may affect the model's ability to handle long conversations.

Deploy

Server Local

Prerequisites

Ensure your GPU nodes are prepared with the NVIDIA container toolkit:

ansible-playbook prositronic.infra.nvidia_container_toolkit

Command

helmfile --state-values-file <(curl -s https://www.prositronic.eu/values/llama-3-3-70b-instruct/q5_k_s/nvidia-p100.yaml) apply

Generated values.yaml

/values/llama-3-3-70b-instruct/q5_k_s/nvidia-p100.yaml

Loading values…

Install llama.cpp

Install llama.cpp from the official build instructions for your platform and backend.

Download Model

curl -L -o llama-3-3-70b-instruct.gguf "https://huggingface.co/bartowski/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-Q5_K_S.gguf"

Start Server

llama-server \
  -m llama-3-3-70b-instruct.gguf \
  --n-gpu-layers 24 \
  --ctx-size 1832 \
  --flash-attn

Verify

curl http://localhost:8080/health

Explore

• Configure a deployment
• Browse models
• Browse hardware

Other quantizations

• Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (FP16)
• Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (Q8_0)
• Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (Q5_K_M)

Other hardware

• Llama 3.3 70B Instruct on CPU Only
• Llama 3.3 70B Instruct on NVIDIA A100 80GB
• Llama 3.3 70B Instruct on NVIDIA H100

Frequently Asked Questions

How much VRAM does Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (Q5_K_S) need?

The Q5_K_S quantization of Llama 3.3 70B Instruct requires 45.32 GB. 24 of 80 layers fit in the 16 GB of VRAM on NVIDIA P100; remaining layers are offloaded to CPU.

Can I run Llama 3.3 70B Instruct on NVIDIA P100?

Yes, with reduced performance. NVIDIA P100 can run Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (Q5_K_S), but only 24 of 80 layers fit in VRAM. The rest are offloaded to CPU.

What is quantization?

Quantization reduces a model's numerical precision from its original floating-point format to a more compact representation. This shrinks the file size and VRAM footprint, making it possible to run large models on consumer hardware. The trade-off is a small reduction in output quality. Q5_K_S compresses Llama 3.3 70B Instruct from its original size down to 45.32 GB.

What quantization should I choose for Llama 3.3 70B Instruct?

Q5_K_S is a medium-quality quantization. Higher-quality quants (Q8, Q6) preserve more model accuracy but need more VRAM. Lower quants (Q4, Q3, Q2) reduce VRAM usage at the cost of some quality. Choose based on your available hardware and quality requirements.

What is flash attention and why is it enabled?

Flash attention is a memory-efficient algorithm that speeds up the attention mechanism in transformer models. It reduces VRAM usage during inference by avoiding the materialisation of the full attention matrix. For Llama 3.3 70B Instruct on NVIDIA P100, flash attention is enabled to maximise context length and throughput within the available 16 GB of VRAM.

Why are some layers offloaded to CPU?

NVIDIA P100 has 16 GB of VRAM, but Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (Q5_K_S) requires approximately 45.32 GB. Only 24 of 80 layers fit in VRAM; the remaining layers run on CPU, which is slower but still functional.

How do I run Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (Q5_K_S) with Ollama?

Run ollama run llama3.3:70b-instruct-q5_k_s to start Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (Q5_K_S). Ollama handles downloading the model weights automatically on first run.

Last updated: March 5, 2026