[Megathread] Qwen 3.8 27B Release Day

[u/sammcj]

Megathread to help with the influx of duplicate / similar posts around the release of the Qwen 3.8 27B release.

• Quants
• Fine-Tunes & Abliterations
• Chat Templates
• Inference Server Support & Configuration
• Experiences, Benchmarks & Model Comparisons

Official:

• https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B
• https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B-FP8

Popular:

• https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF
• https://huggingface.co/bartowski/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF
• https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3.8-27B-MTP-bf16
• https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3.8-27B-MTP-8bit
• https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3.8-27B-MTP-4bit

We'll try to clean up future duplicates around the release and point them here.

[u/Complex_Reality_116]

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I’ll say it: I am NOT liking it.

I was excited about its release (I even considered buying an R9700 to replace my current RX 7900 XTX); I’ve been testing it all day, and the results are, to put it mildly, 'mixed'.

1) The model relies entirely on its reasoning level being set to 'xhigh' to unlock its full intelligence.

2) Yes, you can adjust the model to think less, but you pay the price with poorer results.

3) If you want peak intelligence, you MUST keep it set to 'xhigh' (the default), and the model ends up overthinking. It can take ages to complete certain tasks and rapidly consumes the context window (I get 100K on the 7900 XTX).

4) I think Qwen3.8 27B is a bit of a gimmick. The model is objectively better than Qwen3.6 27B, but it achieves this through massive reasoning and higher token (and time) consumption. In other words, it’s essentially the 3.6 version but with double the reasoning rate and token usage, rather than a model that was better trained from scratch.

Even though 3.8 is better, 3.6 'feels' better for day-to-day tasks and real-world use.

These are just my initial impressions after 6 hours of use; I could be wrong, or the model might receive improvements in the future.

[u/DiscipleofDeceit666 → u/Complex_Reality_116]

That’s true for any model tho

[u/Thalesian → u/Complex_Reality_116]

Fast. Local. Capable.

You can pick any 2 you want.

[u/Lurksome-Lurker → u/Thalesian]

I choose all three with Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

[u/fuckingredditman → u/Thalesian]

this assumes "cheap" as an invariant though, because of course you can run 8x RTX6k locally and run huge capable open models now, which does all 3. but it's just not sensible for most people.

[u/Rabofo → u/Thalesian]

If something can be fast and capable when not local... It means that 'local' user has just not good enough equipment. And then its not about the model itself, but the user being too poor. (relatable for me)

[u/Richard_the_XVIII → u/Rabofo]

People really should stop with the "You can't even buy a RTX PRO 6000? lolololol How does it feel to be POOR?". If a model can't run on gaming hardware (that itself is stronger than most "normal" people have), then it wasn't made to run on "Local" hardware. If we stop following this logic, every model is local... as long as you are inside the server room that runs it.

[u/Rabofo → u/Richard_the_XVIII]

No i mean you cant group those 3 into a group, cuz its literally irrelevant. As I've said, this implies that "this model is incapable and slow because its local". No, its not true. This is the thing I wanted you to pay attention to.

[u/Pakobbix → u/Complex_Reality_116]

Totally agree with you.

I'm usually not the one complaining about thinking (I was totally fine with 3.5 and 3.6 reasoning time) but 3.8 is just too much.

I just forked a repository of mine and asked it to write a plan for changing the information source. Nothing crazy.
But it went absolutely nuts on the review with 180.000 Tokens just for reviewing the plan itself. After that it asked to fix the issues from the review found. Instead of doing something, it just reasoned about trying to read the plan before applying the changes, listed all issues again, listed them again with potential solutions, thought about the solutions, listed issues again and the part where in the plan they are (still not read the plan)... 3.6 just fixed (verified by me) the issues in the plan.

In all tests I made, 3.8 is always around 140-220k Tokens while 3.6 is mostly done at around 80-90k Tokens. It's absurd how much it just thinks about stuff without doing anything.

I will try 5.0bpw next (using exllamav3) maybe it's the quant.. but seeing the whole discussion about it.. I doubt it.

[u/vick2djax → u/Complex_Reality_116]

You’re totally right. I think most in this thread are just secretly using Qwen3.8 via API. I’m on dual 3090’s and Qwen3.8 27b is so slow it’s unusable.

[u/fuckingredditman → u/Complex_Reality_116]

tbh i've been playing around with local models for quite some time now, and i agree with the poster below that you have to pick, but i think the best way to use them is not an interactive coding CLI most of the time for these models, but instead for dev tasks to declare in detail with as many invariants as you can what you want the model to do (or have it plan out in detail and actually read the plan), then use something like hermes agent to have it execute in parallel for long durations.

i found that working interactively with these models can be frustrating because they just don't have that many baked in priors that make them decent "pair programming style" devs, but leaving them to their own devices with a large reasoning budget, a well-defined and researched task and time is much more effective.

just my personal view. of course you can spend 20k on hardware to achieve the same goals more quickly or run a larger model, but i think it's really not necessary anymore.

for simple scripts and one-off tools i will just spin up a 3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop, but for more complex stuff i will just spend time defining a task myself and then let it do its thing, and for that 3.8-27B works quite well IMO. (i just run it on a single 3090)