DeepSeek-R1 VRAM math: 32B hits 24GB limit

Practical VRAM accounting for local LLMs is genuinely underserved, but this post is a low-signal Reddit thread with score 0 and no accessible tool link.

• –Most published VRAM estimates omit KV cache scaling, which grows linearly with context — a critical blind spot for anyone pushing context windows
• –32B Q4_K_M at ~20.5GB on a single 4090 leaves almost no headroom; the 70B at ~42.8GB on dual 48GB cards is similarly constrained
• –The author built a calculator tool but withheld the link to avoid self-promotion rules, making this post largely informational without a deliverable
• –Dual-GPU setups for the 70B face bandwidth bottlenecks that limit tokens-per-second regardless of VRAM headroom