Reddit asks which laptop runs Qwen3.5-35B-A3B locally

This is a community help thread, not an announcement — but it surfaces a real insight: VRAM alone doesn't determine local LLM performance; system RAM capacity and CPU-GPU memory sharing are equally critical for large MoE models.

• –Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is a Mixture-of-Experts model that only activates 3.5B parameters per token, making it unusually RAM-friendly despite its 35B parameter count
• –The HP Omen Max with RTX 5080 (16GB VRAM) failed while an older RTX 4080 (12GB VRAM) + 64GB system RAM succeeded — demonstrating that total addressable memory matters more than GPU VRAM alone
• –64GB of system RAM appears to be the threshold that enables this model class on consumer laptops
• –The trend toward CPU-GPU unified or shared memory (seen in Apple Silicon and AMD APUs) may give those platforms an edge for local LLM inference over discrete GPU laptops