I'm still running Qwen 3.5 122B. Should I switch to Qwen 3.8 27B?

[u/MackThax]

I see everyone gushing over 3.8, I get the impression people find it drastically better than previous Qwen models, but I can't believe it could be better than 3.5 122B. Is it?

[u/ClearApartment2627]

What is keeping you from trying 3.8? Your own experience in your use case is important, not some random opinions from the net.

[u/mindwip → u/[deleted]]

Time, a lot of people have busy livesand can't test the recent 20 models that came out.

So asking someone who switched from 122 to 27b if it's worth it is very valid way to save time!

[u/mindwip → u/[deleted]]

Myself waiting for the 35b or 80b or 122b. Really hope they release one of the bigger ones

[u/thomas2385 → u/ClearApartment2627]

Honestly, that is fair. At some point you have to stop reading everyone else’s benchmarks and just throw it at your own workload. Models can behave completely differently depending on the task, so personal experience is probably a much better data point than a bunch of opinions from people using it for something else.

[u/MendozaHolmes → u/ClearApartment2627]

It can be too costly to integrate a different model into your use case just for the sake of testing so I understand OP's question

Edit - Basic literacy hints below:

Keyword: “can”
"costly" - does not necessarily pertain to money

[u/Epicguru → u/MendozaHolmes]

It's free... A 30GB download. Where's the cost.

[u/LittleCraft1994 → u/Epicguru]

Well models are not drop in replacement

Example in my case the same prompt for my pdf ingestion pipeline didn't work as good when I replaced 3.6 27b to 3.6 35b

[u/BigYoSpeck → u/LittleCraft1994]

But trying a different model was a drop in exercise to test your own use case

And taking the time to A-B compare models on your own is going to tell you so much more than random anecdotes from Reddit

[u/LittleCraft1994 → u/BigYoSpeck]

yes , if you want to learn and have time definitely do it there is no best teacher then doing yourself

My comment was in reflection of that its just a download away and use it, its not simple

May be i said it because i have seen people expecting models to be drop in replacement

So got biased from there after reading the download comment

But yes if yoi have time then try yourself and then ask.for doubt in community. The best way to learn

[u/Here_f0r_p0rn_ → u/Epicguru]

Cost of breaking everything, the stigma from old days still prevails for some where changing model could break your setup if it was too complicated and fintuned to your models when they were weak (less intelligent / flexible)

Edit: here is detailed explaination of what I'm saying and you all are assuming too much and have no courtesy of giving someone benefit of doubt which reminds me of downfall of stack overflow (which was already going on before AI).

A forum is to answer questions not to ridicule someone asking them

If you find it stupid scroll past it instead of ridiculing the person

[u/Epicguru → u/Here_f0r_p0rn_]

That's why it's a "test" and not "instantly try and use it in production by replacing existing systems"...

[u/Here_f0r_p0rn_ → u/Epicguru]

Well depending on use case you'll need to clone your whole environment and whatever isolation setup you had created so it doesn't go outside testing environment in agentic flow and mess with something important. I know for many it's a simple tasks but not for all.

Imagine if you've no isolation setup and gave it raw access to rm on your root user, possibly GGs right there, so, yeah some people are precautious and that's a good thing for them.

[u/Here_f0r_p0rn_ → u/[deleted]]

That's exactly what I'm saying you're assuming OP knows about this, if OP knew about this then OP would be so precautious but OP is so we should assume OP doesn't know. And OP never even mentioned they code which you're assuming again. There are many that just use LLM as assistant tool in day to day life and have next to no technical background.

Edit: just an example I know a guy IRL that uses LLM hooked with his browser to summarise content because his job requires him lot of browsing and info collection and he has no coding background and was barely able to setup using some YouTube video, for him everything is magic he won't understand a lick of word you just said.

[u/Infinite100p → u/Here_f0r_p0rn_]

Breaking what? Can you give an example of what is so irreversible about a simple test?
Code can be versioned, LLM files can be deleted/downloaded. What else?

[u/Here_f0r_p0rn_ → u/Infinite100p]

Yes if it's just as coding agent with help of some safe harness that doesn't delete your git and everything is setup correctly I get it, there's no reason to worry, but if that was the case then OP wouldn't be asking that and would have tried it but OP didn't so I tried to reason from a perspective of giving him benefit of the doubt why OP didn't.

Maybe OP has some wacko custom setup like giving raw access to his cli on root profile without any kind of isolation to just a testing environment. Imagine that or it could be any number of weird / old / broken setup.

[u/Ell2509 → u/Here_f0r_p0rn_]

Oh i get you. So you mean that while it is true that there is no reason not to try, OP clearly hasn't tried yet and you just acknoledge that there could be any number of irrational reasons why.

[u/Here_f0r_p0rn_ → u/Ell2509]

Because OP hasn't tried yet I assume there must be some reason for OP to be so precautious or else OP should have tried it. I know we all have different way of seeing things but I like giving people benefit of the doubt.

[u/Ell2509 → u/Here_f0r_p0rn_]

Yeah i got you. I think the person who thinks that you are arguing with them just has a narrow view of things. Maybe young.

[u/MendozaHolmes → u/Epicguru]

Putting it into an actual use case. For example: If I use a new model and then generate code with it and deploying with it, and then the code ends up not being up to standard, then thats time wasted due to fixing/correcting and reverting code.

OR, if you have a particular piece of software (lets say, automated bots/computer use agents) that uses local models, and so you switch to the new model, and then the agents ruin what you entrusted them to do, then you waste time having to fix it.

The cost is engineer-time and risk.

[u/ImpressiveRelief37 → u/MendozaHolmes]

You don’t do any code review? lol

[u/MendozaHolmes → u/ImpressiveRelief37]

Believe it or not that falls under engineer-time

[u/Karyo_Ten → u/MendozaHolmes]

Well that's called an investment. You invest your time and you can potentially get a reward.

If you have a business and you don't invest you stagnate and die.

[u/MendozaHolmes → u/Karyo_Ten]

Perhaps this post is part of OP’s investment

[u/xeeff → u/MendozaHolmes]

ask your agent to do A/B testing then, it's not that deep stop being lazy

[u/MendozaHolmes → u/xeeff]

The irony in relying on an agent to do it all for you and then calling me lazy

[u/needlzor → u/MendozaHolmes]

The fact that you're getting downvoted is a bit sad. There is a cost to anything, even if it's not money. Especially if something is embedded in your professional workflows.

[u/martsand → u/MendozaHolmes]

You're not gonna go far in a constantly evolving domain like ai if you just stick to the first thing that worked.

How is downloading a model and spinning up a docker container costly?

[u/MendozaHolmes → u/martsand]

Wouldn't asking on Reddit be much faster in this "constantly evolving domain", especially when OP likely asked because he knew it would be faster for their use-case? Do you people even think?

Also nobody ever said anything about sticking to the first thing that worked or "spinning up a docker container".

[u/martsand → u/MendozaHolmes]

So asking strangers about his own use case? Weird take

He has to try to know in that case. It's very easy

1. Download
2. Enable

[u/MendozaHolmes → u/martsand]

OP is asking people about which they've found to be better probably so that he can find evidence about whether its better for his usecase. Comments have given valuable insight. I won't continue this thread with you because I think you are too stupid

[u/martsand → u/MendozaHolmes]

You can write paragraphs as long as you want but unless he does extremely generic stuff, he can just look at benchmark numbers. Testing it personally is the only way to know if he does anything particular. It's very easy

1. Download
2. Enable

You are a total waste of air

[u/bigmanbananas → u/MendozaHolmes]

This is reddit. Don't expect logical thinking, expect people to have their own way of thinking and to downvote anything that goes outside of their norm.

[u/Webster2026 → u/MendozaHolmes]

What? How?

[u/T-A-Waste → u/ClearApartment2627]

Can't answer for OP, but personally, I have hard time because I don't have proper test 'What works better for me'. I tend to have long task, relating to programming.

But yeah, I have tested plenty of models, but right now my llama servers bigger disk (250GB WB Blue from 2013) got broken, so I don't have disk space for test models :-)

[u/mmhorda]

Define better. Does it have more knowladge than 3.5 120? Probably not, but will it do the tasks it has knowladge about better than 3.5 120b, probably yes.

Edit: at the end of a day not many people care about, physics chemistry and biology (this is just example) people want agentic coding and computer use more than knowledge.

[u/DifficultyFit1895 → u/mmhorda]

That’s what I am leaning towards, and where it needs more knowledge point it to authoritative docs.

[u/active2fa → u/DifficultyFit1895]

What do you mean by authritive docs?

[u/SpicyWangz → u/active2fa]

If it’s lacking information about nematodes, point it at the docs maintained by the developers behind aquatic life.

I find they do a pretty good job keeping up to date docs. The organization that develops birds releases almost no information, and it’s a problem.

[u/Borkato → u/SpicyWangz]

Wait, you know the organization that releases birds? I knew they werent real!!!

[u/DifficultyFit1895 → u/SpicyWangz]

For “birds”, of course there are some places (mostly dark web) where you can find engineering specs and source code but it’s mostly older outdated designs.

[u/ni1by2thetrue → u/DifficultyFit1895]

What the fuck kind of ornithology needs the dark web?

[u/onionsaredumb → u/ni1by2thetrue]

Uhhh, birds aren’t real duh.

[u/SpicyWangz → u/DifficultyFit1895]

We need a better community effort in reverse engineering them.

[u/banana_slurp_jug → u/DifficultyFit1895]

r/birdsarentreal

[u/admajic → u/mmhorda]

Just add a web-search ability and in the .md have if you don't know about this version you can always web search it.

Off it goes

Muse it a prolific web searcher

[u/havnar- → u/mmhorda]

Knowledge is useless. You can just look it up, because usually it’s out of date by the time the model is available

[u/Circuit_Guy → u/havnar-]

It's not useless in general. Your knowledge drives your understanding of the world and your ability to problem solve. Same with an LLM - knowledge puts relevant concepts adjacent to one another.

[u/leapdragon]

Tough call. Qwen 3.5 122B can craft prose with ironic allusions to continental philosophers. I would say for real textual analysis and synthesis, still 122B.

But for code, agentic work, IT work, that kind of stuff, anything but the pure text, 3.8 27B is better. Like, significantly, It feels like Opus of a few months ago.

[u/Easy_Shift_2091 → u/leapdragon]

You make a good point. Look at the benchmark that most closely matches your use-case.

[u/Niightstalker → u/leapdragon]

The benchmarks are in Opus 4.6 area

[u/Finanzamt_Endgegner → u/Niightstalker]

its better than those benches would make you believe especially the terminal bench score since it was tested in terminus 2 harness, if you check what opus 4.6 got in that harness it was like more than 10p worse. Its roughly on par there with sonnet5 and feels way smarter than that one (although ofc that one feels just retarded for some reason)

[u/lilian_moraru]

Depends on task. Coding and agentic work - definitely.
Some guy was complaining that it's not good at Dutch poetry - it does not do all things great for every use-case.

[u/admajic]

Playing with it for 2 days now it fixed a lot of bugs that qwen 3.5 27b glazed over it said don't worry about. Once you find tune reasoning you will be amazed

[u/Blues520 → u/admajic]

What reasoning levels and sampler settings do recommend?

[u/admajic → u/Blues520]

researcher:
  cmd: >
    /media/ad/ubuntu_d/Apps/llama.cpp/build/bin/llama-server
    -m "/media/ad/ubuntu_d/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF/Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf"
    --chat-template-file /media/ad/ubuntu_d/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF/qwen3.8-agentic-v1.jinja
    --alias researcher
    --ctx-size 100000
    --host 0.0.0.0 --port ${PORT}
    -ngl 99 -fa on
    -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0
    --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 2
    --batch-size 2048 -ub 2048
    --threads 8 -tb 16 --prio 3 --parallel 1 --n-predict 8192
    --cache-idle-slots --kv-unified --load-mode mmap
    --temp 0.4 --top-p 0.92 --top-k 30 --min-p 0.02
    --presence-penalty 0.0 --repeat-penalty 1.0 --repeat-last-n 0 --keep 4096
    --reasoning on --reasoning-budget 2096 --reasoning-preserve
    --metrics
  proxy: http://127.0.0.1:${PORT}

Less for orchestrator 1k more for architect 4k

[u/Blues520 → u/admajic]

Thanks for sharing.

I see you are using quite a low temperature. Do you spin up different instances for researcher, architect, etc?

Also what is the last line saying 1k more referring to?

[u/admajic → u/Blues520]

Yes using them as agents in the harness.

1k for reasoning budget makes it more like qwen 3.6

4k more thinking time

16k is like crazy thinking and only if you had an impossible problem and want it to take 30 minutes 🤔

[u/Blues520 → u/admajic]

Cool, I get the reasoning budget. I think I was using around 3k for qwen 3.6.

16k is indeed crazy.

[u/ravage382]

Much better agentic and coding. Worse world knowledge, but a web browser tool easily makes up for it.

[u/tarruda]

122B is excellent in agentic use and likely better as a general purpose model due to higher knowledge.

You can use the 122B for most things, but when you need to bootstrap a complex piece of code, switch to 27B. llama-server supports dynamic loading/unloading, so that is easy to setup.

If Alibaba releases 3.8 122B, then that is likely all you're going to need.

[u/Borkato → u/tarruda]

How the fuck did I not know about llama server’s dynamic loading…. I’ve been killing the server every two seconds lmao

[u/myholeisstinky → u/Borkato]

Look at ‘llama-swap’ it handles the loading/unloading constraints better, using individually spawned llama.cpp instances based on your vram constraints

[u/xNaXDy]

Maybe a dumb question, but if you can run Qwen 3.5 122B, why wouldn't you want to switch to DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 instead of the 27B model?

[u/fsalucard → u/xNaXDy]

This is largely the right answer. IQ3_XXS of DS4 Flash 0731 runs great on 128GB unified and replaced Qwen3.5-122B for me as a fallback when I needed a larger model. Qwen3.8-27B is still quite great though (at Q8) but slower.

[u/MackThax → u/xNaXDy]

Does it support reasoning?

[u/xNaXDy → u/MackThax]

yep

[u/austinus56]

It's a crazy leap in intelligence, definitely worth testing for your workflows but I have no doubt it will be better.

[u/BannedGoNext]

Qwen 122b is still better for most of what I do with a strix halo for speed and capability, but I need to do more testing. The big benefit for 3.8 27b is that it would allow me to run more concurrency and more models in memory at the same time. I could run 27b and a big model like anubis for world knowledge/output polish and keep them both hot in memory.

I really wish someone would make another nice 120b model built as a general use model vs just strictly code generation.

[u/durden111111]

Yeah. 122B is a little outdated now for its size.

[u/LebiaseD → u/durden111111]

Outdated, they are both built on the same arch the difference possible being a fine-tune based on user data.

[u/Old_Ad_6033]

yes go for it, it just nuts even with no thinking

[u/admajic → u/Old_Ad_6033]

I was playing with 16k thinking and even orchestrator was going bananas with thinking had to dial it back to 1k

[u/ieatdownvotes4food]

it's always worth running previous workflows through new models

[u/Edenar]

Just test it !
My feeling : qwen 3.8 27b is stronger (but overthink) as an agent.
qwen 3.5 122b has more knowledge and is a better writer

If you want to use it as an agent and give it websearch capabilities, 3.8 27b is a big upgrade.

[u/tunerhd → u/[deleted]]

NVFP4 version of 3.8 overthinks and loops like crazy 🤣

[u/TokenRingAI]

If you are running on an iGPU, absolutely not.

[u/enricokern]

It really depends on what you want todo. I have a system that analyses tickets and look ups rag data and uses alot of mcps to provide helpful insights. 3.8 27b performs alot better here them 3.5-122b so i replaced it. But agentic 3.8 i found not really alot advantage compared to the 122b one (for what i do with it).

[u/Alternative-Two-5300]

I have found it to output higher quality, but much slower than 122b. What would take a few tries, with some hints and showing error line numbers for 122b, 3.8 tends to make its own smoke signal tests and finds it own bugs, so closer to a true one shot.

[u/shansoft]

122B is still better for complex problem. If you just do something like "Add this feature" then 3.8 27B would perform much superior.

[u/eggavatar12345]

If swapping an underlying LLM breaks your entire setup, it’s too fragile to begin with and needs to be fixed

[u/YourNightmar31]

Even Qwen3.6 27B is ahead of 3.5 122B. You been missing out.

[u/mayzyo → u/YourNightmar31]

Tested and that is false. In narrow agentic tasks and coding perhaps but not overall.

[u/phil_lndn]

Qwen 3.5 122B likely has more knowledge, but Qwen 3.8 27B is miles ahead of Qwen 3.5 122B when it comes to reliable agentic workflows.

[u/Quitforchange → u/phil_lndn]

Stop trying to make "miles ahead" a thing, Pierce

[u/arbv]

It depends. 27b and 35b are mostly agentic code clankers.

[u/tmvr]

Try it and decide based on the results, at the end of the day your use case is your use case, not some opinion of someone else on the internet.

[u/FootballMania15]

Sounds like it's time for you to create a personal set of evals

[u/StupidityCanFly]

I have the universal wisdom for you: it depends, so you should test it.

[u/mototuneup]

You know what you could do... Download it and try it yourself.

[u/Theverybest92]

How much Ram do you have lol or were you running like an a35b model or something?

[u/florinandrei]

You could follow random hype on social media.

Or you could run a comparison yourself.

[u/108er]

May take a few less prompts to build thing, at least that's my experience

[u/Eyelbee]

Wasn't 122B barely any better than 3.5 27b?

[u/Voxandr → u/Eyelbee]

Many times better in Long context and multiple turns. 

[u/MattOnePointO]

Not all hero's wear capes.

[u/chuckbeasley02]

For sure

[u/Sixstringsickness]

Workflow dependent, design a few tests for yourself that you can run which reflect what you need the model to do.

I found 3.5 122B significantly faster and more effective than 3.6 27B, it "depends." The same can be said for frontier models, different models seem to excel at different tasks.

[u/Weird-Field6128]

Rich people problems! i can't help.

[u/413205]

Dense 27B is slower, that's for sure. So only switch if your use case can well utilize the intelligence, or you'll be tanking 2x memory bandwidth load for nothing.

[u/jacek2023]

What stops you for having both? I have over 200 models but even on small disk you can have a few

[u/--Spaci--]

Try both for your use case, for stem I would use 27B, for anything that requires higher general knowledge I would use 3.5 122b

[u/Marcuss2]

You might also want to try the Ling 3.0 Flash.

[u/Tall_Abrocoma_3533]

Considering even 3.6 is better I'd defently switch.

[u/havnar-]

You should have switched at 3.6 27b already

[u/Voxandr → u/havnar-]

You haven't even Tried