Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 (Q4_1) — 19.4 GBon NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF

Q4_1 NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF

Overview

Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 is a 23.57B parameter dense language model by Mistral AI, with code, multilingual, tool-calls capabilities. It supports a context window of up to 32,768 tokens.

Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 is a 23.57-billion-parameter dense transformer from Mistral AI, optimized for instruction following, code generation, and multilingual conversation. It occupies a mid-range parameter class that offers strong performance relative to its size, competing with larger 30B models on many benchmarks. The model supports tool calling and 10 languages including English, French, Chinese, and Japanese. With a 32K context window and flash attention, it fits on a single consumer GPU at Q4 quantization for efficient self-hosted inference.

At Q4_1 quantization (medium quality tier), the model weighs 13.85 GB. This fits within the 20 GB of VRAM on NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF, enabling full GPU inference.

Hardware Requirements

Model size	13.85 GB
VRAM available	20 GB
VRAM used	19.4 GB
GPU layers	40 / 40
Context size	22,572
Backend	cuda13
Flash attention	Yes

Performance Notes

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/mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501/q4_1/nvidia-rtx4000sff.yaml) apply

Generated values.yaml

/values/mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501/q4_1/nvidia-rtx4000sff.yaml

Loading values…

Install llama.cpp

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

Download Model

curl -L -o mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501.gguf "https://huggingface.co/bartowski/Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501-GGUF/resolve/main/Mistral-Small-24B-Instruct-2501-Q4_1.gguf"

Start Server

llama-server \
  -m mistral-small-24b-instruct-2501.gguf \
  --n-gpu-layers 40 \
  --ctx-size 22572 \
  --flash-attn

Verify

curl http://localhost:8080/health

Explore

• Configure a deployment
• Browse models
• Browse hardware

Other quantizations

• Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 (FP16)
• Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 (Q8_0)
• Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 (Q5_K_M)

Other hardware

• Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 on CPU Only
• Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 on NVIDIA A100 80GB
• Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 on NVIDIA H100

Frequently Asked Questions

How much VRAM does Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 (Q4_1) need?

The Q4_1 quantization of Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 requires 13.85 GB. All 40 layers fit in the 20 GB of VRAM available on NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF, enabling full GPU acceleration.

Can I run Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 on NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF?

Yes. NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF provides 20 GB of VRAM, which is enough to run Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 (Q4_1) with all layers on the GPU for optimal performance.

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. Q4_1 compresses Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 from its original size down to 13.85 GB.

What quantization should I choose for Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501?

Q4_1 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 Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 on NVIDIA RTX 4000 SFF, flash attention is enabled to maximise context length and throughput within the available 20 GB of VRAM.

How do I run Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 (Q4_1) with Ollama?

Run ollama run mistral-small:24b-instruct-2501-q4_1 to start Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 (Q4_1). Ollama handles downloading the model weights automatically on first run.

Last updated: March 12, 2026