Qwen3.5 35B fits 5070 Ti, 32GB

The real question here is not “what’s the biggest model” but “what size still feels usable once VRAM, RAM, context, and offload all compete for memory.” Qwen3.5’s MoE lineup makes that tradeoff friendlier than most dense models, but the speed cliff arrives fast once you lean on system RAM too hard.

• –Community advice lands on 35B-A3B as the sensible upper bound for a 16GB GPU, not a 70B-class dense model
• –Quantization is the difference between practical and painful; Q4/Q6 variants are where consumer setups usually live
• –Context length matters because KV cache can eat the headroom you thought you had
• –Swapping to HDD is the real risk to avoid, but staying under VRAM+RAM with margin usually prevents it
• –For most local work, 9B to 35B MoE is the useful exploration band on this hardware