BENCHMARK REPORT

Can I Run DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) on NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)?

Comprehensive technical verdict based on static weights, dynamic KV Cache (8k baseline context window), and CUDA runtime overhead.

Official Verdict

NO — CUDA OOM

Executive Hardware Compatibility Summary: DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) on NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)

Authoritative verdict, memory allocation, and token generation performance:

Direct Answer: CUDA OOM — Deficit of 331.2 GBDeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) exceeds dedicated physical VRAM and triggers PCIe layer offloading on NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB) (80GB). At standard Q4_K_M 4-bit quantization and an 8,192-token context window, total memory demand is 411.16 GB (408.64 GB weights + 0.57 GB dynamic KV cache + 1.15 GB OS & CUDA buffers). Physical VRAM is exceeded by 331.16 GB, forcing 50 transformer layers to offload across the PCIe bus to host DDR RAM. Estimated generation throughput is ~5.4 tokens/sec (~185.2 ms per token) with prompt prefill processing reaching ~1771 tok/s.

Run Verdict

CUDA OOM (Offload)

Total Required VRAM

411.16 GB / 80 GB

Decoding Speed

~5.4 tok/s (185.2ms)

Safe Context Window

Offload to RAM

Hardware Architecture & VRAM Topology

Ampere

NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB) • 2039 GB/s Bandwidth

Token Generation

~5.4 tok/s(185.2 ms)

OOM SPILL

VRAM Utilization Breakdown411.16 GB / 80 GB (250%)

VRAM Limit (80G)

408.64G

-331.16G Spill

Weights

408.64 GB

KV Cache

0.57 GB

Activation

0.8 GB

OS/Driver

1.15 GB

Overflow

331.16 GB

Hardware Chokepoint: PCIe Bus Throttling Active

GPU VRAM (80 GB)

11 / 61 Layers Loaded

2039 GB/s Bus

PCIe 4.0 x16 Bottleneck

31.5 GB/s

-97% Bandwidth Drop

Host DDR5 System RAM

50 Layers Offloaded

+385.2 GB RAM Siphoned

Why does your generation speed collapse to ~5.4 tok/s? Because for every single generated token, model weights across the 50 offloaded layers must be transferred across the 31.5 GB/s PCIe slot from host system RAM.

Context Window vs VRAM Scaling Curve

Blue line indicates total VRAM demand across context lengths; Red dashed line is physical VRAM ceiling.

CUDA OOM — Deficit of 331.2 GB

oom

50/61 layers will spill to CPU RAM, causing severe PCIe bandwidth throttling (est. 5.4 tok/s).

Throughput

~5.4 tok/s

185.2 ms / token

Headroom

-331.16 GB

250% of capacity

Layers Fit

11 / 61

50 on DDR5

Max Safe Ctx

Tokens before OOM

Host DDR RAM Status:EXCEEDS SYSTEM RAM (385.2 GB required > 32 GB RAM)!

Static Permalink:/can-i-run/deepseek-r1-671b-on-a100-sxm-80g

Open Static Report

Ready-to-Run CLI Commands

# Note: Model requires CPU offloading (11/61 layers on GPU)
ollama run deepseek-r1:671b

Commands include automatic memory ceiling flags and model layer offload configurations calculated above.

Cloud Hardware Failover

gpuy.dev On-Demand Compute

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Hardware Specification Summary

GPU ArchitectureAmpere

Memory Bandwidth2039 GB/s

Model Parameters671B (MoE)

Attention ArchitectureDeepSeek MLA

Prompt Prefill Speed~1771 tok/s (TTFT ~4626ms)

Benchmark Context Tested8,192 tokens

Customize in Full Matcher Simulator →

Global Compatibility Matrix for NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)

Evaluated at Standard Q4_K_M Precision with 8,192 Tokens Context Window

Compatibility Index

91% (52/57)

51 Pass1 Tight5 OOM

Model & Architecture	Category	Parameters	Required VRAM	Fit Status	Est. Speed	Simulate
DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE)MLAMoE DeepSeek	MoE	671B(37B active)	411.16 GB	OOM (-331.16G)	~5.4 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-V3 (671B Base/Chat)MLAMoE DeepSeek	MoE	671B(37B active)	411.16 GB	OOM (-331.16G)	~5.4 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B DeepSeek	LLM	70.6B	47.6 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~33.2 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B DeepSeek	LLM	32.8B	23.75 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~71.5 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B DeepSeek	LLM	14.7B	11.94 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~159.4 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B DeepSeek	LLM	8B	7.33 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-8B DeepSeek	LLM	8.03B	7.48 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B DeepSeek	LLM	7.6B	6.49 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B DeepSeek	LLM	1.8B	2.61 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-Coder-V2 Lite (16B / 2.4B MoE)MLAMoE DeepSeek	MoE	15.7B(2.4B active)	11.21 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
DeepSeek-Coder-V2 (236B / 21B MoE)MLAMoE DeepSeek	MoE	236B(21B active)	146.23 GB	OOM (-66.23G)	~27.4 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 Coder 72B Instruct Qwen	LLM	72.7B	48.87 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~32.2 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct Qwen	LLM	72.7B	48.87 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~32.2 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 VL 72B (Vision Flagship) Qwen	LLM	72.7B	48.87 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~32.2 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 VL 7B (Vision) Qwen	LLM	7.61B	6.5 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B Instruct Qwen	LLM	32.8B	23.75 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~71.5 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 Coder 14B Instruct Qwen	LLM	14.7B	11.94 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~159.4 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B Instruct Qwen	LLM	7.6B	6.49 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 Coder 1.5B Instruct Qwen	LLM	1.54B	2.45 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 32B Instruct Qwen	LLM	32.8B	23.75 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~71.5 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 14B Instruct Qwen	LLM	14.7B	11.94 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~159.4 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct Qwen	LLM	7.6B	6.49 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 3B Instruct Qwen	LLM	3.1B	3.59 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Qwen 2.5 0.5B Instruct Qwen	LLM	0.49B	1.8 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct Llama	LLM	70.6B	47.6 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~33.2 tok/s	Simulate
Llama 3.1 70B Instruct Llama	LLM	70.6B	47.6 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~33.2 tok/s	Simulate
Llama 3.1 405B Instruct Llama	LLM	405B	252.77 GB	OOM (-172.77G)	~0.8 tok/s	Simulate
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct Llama	LLM	8B	7.33 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Llama 3.2 3B Instruct Llama	LLM	3.2B	4.28 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Llama 3.2 1B Instruct Llama	LLM	1.23B	2.41 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct Llama	LLM	10.6B	8.92 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Llama 3.2 90B Vision Instruct Llama	LLM	89B	59.46 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~26.3 tok/s	Simulate
Microsoft Phi-4 (14B) Phi	LLM	14.7B	12.01 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~159.4 tok/s	Simulate
Microsoft Phi-3.5 Mini (3.8B) Phi	LLM	3.82B	6.91 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Google Gemma 2 9B Instruct Gemma	LLM	9.2B	9.79 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Mistral Small 3 (24B Instruct) Mistral	LLM	24B	18.12 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~97.7 tok/s	Simulate
Mistral NeMo (12B Instruct) Mistral	LLM	12.2B	10.15 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3 Mistral	LLM	7.25B	6.88 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Codestral 22B (Mistral AI) Mistral	LLM	22.2B	17.02 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~105.6 tok/s	Simulate
Mistral Large 2 (123B) Mistral	LLM	123B	79.77 GB	Tight Fit	~19.1 tok/s	Simulate
Mixtral 8x7B (MoE 47B)MoE Mistral	MoE	46.7B(12.9B active)	31.15 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Mixtral 8x22B (MoE 141B)MoE Mistral	MoE	141B(39B active)	89.67 GB	OOM (-9.67G)	~24.1 tok/s	Simulate
Pixtral 12B (Multimodal) Mistral	LLM	12.4B	10.28 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Gemma 2 27B Instruct Gemma	LLM	27.2B	21.26 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~86.2 tok/s	Simulate
Google Gemma 2 2B Instruct Gemma	LLM	2.6B	3.84 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
GLM-4 9B Chat (Zhipu AI) GLM	LLM	9.4B	7.79 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
FLUX.1 [dev] (12B DiT) FLUX	ImageGen	12B	15.68 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
FLUX.1 [schnell] (4-step) FLUX	ImageGen	12B	15.68 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL 1.0) SDXL	ImageGen	3.5B	7.51 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Stable Diffusion 1.5 (Classic) SD	ImageGen	1B	5.78 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Whisper Large v3 (1.5B) Whisper	Audio	1.5B	3.64 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Kokoro 82M (Text-to-Speech) Kokoro	Audio	0.082B	1.56 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Wan2.1 (14B Text-to-Video) Wan	ImageGen	14.2B	18.72 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~165 tok/s	Simulate
Wan2.1 (1.3B Video) Wan	ImageGen	1.3B	7.28 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
HunyuanVideo (13B Video DiT) Hunyuan	ImageGen	13B	19.69 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large (8B) SD	ImageGen	8.1B	13.3 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate
BAAI BGE-M3 (Multilingual Embedding) BAAI	LLM	0.56B	2.54 GB	100% VRAM Fit	~180 tok/s	Simulate

DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) Context Scaling Matrix on NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)

Dynamic KV Cache footprint and generation throughput measured across sequence lengths (Q4_K_M weights):

Context Window	KV Cache Memory	Total VRAM Demand	Compatibility Status	Offloaded Layers	Est. Generation Speed
2,048 tokens (2k)	0.14 GB	410.73 GB / 80 GB	CUDA OOM	50 layers on RAM	~5.4 tok/s
4,096 tokens (4k)	0.28 GB	410.87 GB / 80 GB	CUDA OOM	50 layers on RAM	~5.4 tok/s
8,192 tokens (8k)Standard Baseline	0.57 GB	411.16 GB / 80 GB	CUDA OOM	50 layers on RAM	~5.4 tok/s
16,384 tokens (16k)	1.14 GB	411.73 GB / 80 GB	CUDA OOM	50 layers on RAM	~5.4 tok/s
32,768 tokens (32k)	2.27 GB	412.86 GB / 80 GB	CUDA OOM	50 layers on RAM	~5.4 tok/s

Hardware Compatibility Q&A: DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) on NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)

Technical answers for memory allocation, CUDA overhead, and execution parameters.

Can NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB) run DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE)?

CUDA OOM — Deficit of 331.2 GB. 50/61 layers will spill to CPU RAM, causing severe PCIe bandwidth throttling (est. 5.4 tok/s). At an 8k context window, total VRAM demand is 411.16 GB compared to NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)'s 80 GB frame buffer.

How much VRAM does DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) require?

At standard Q4_K_M quantization and 8k context, DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) requires approximately 411.16 GB of VRAM. This includes 408.64 GB for model weights, 0.57 GB for dynamic KV cache (compressed using DeepSeek MLA), 0.8 GB for activation buffers, and 1.15 GB for OS display and CUDA runtime overhead.

What generation speed (tokens/sec) can I expect on NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)?

Estimated autoregressive token generation speed is ~5.4 tokens per second with a per-token latency of ~185.2 ms, powered by 2039 GB/s memory bandwidth. Prompt prefill processing reaches ~1771 tok/s (TTFT ~4626 ms).

What causes CUDA Out-of-Memory (OOM) when running DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE)?

CUDA OOM occurs when total memory consumption exceeds NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)'s 80 GB physical VRAM. While model weights stay static, the KV cache grows with every conversation token. When VRAM fills up, inference engines (like Ollama or llama.cpp) must offload remaining layers across the PCIe bus (31.5 GB/s) to host system RAM, causing generation speed to drop sharply.

How do I run DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) locally on NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)?

You can run DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) directly with Ollama using "ollama run deepseek-r1-671b". For advanced serving with vLLM or llama.cpp, copy the ready-to-run CLI commands in the CLI Commands section above with optimal context, quantization, and GPU layer offload parameters.

Related Hardware Benchmarks & Model Alternatives

Compare DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) and NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB) against alternative configurations:

Recommended Alternative GPUs for DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE)

Explore how DeepSeek-R1 (671B Full MoE) performs across other budget, midrange, and flagship architectures:

Other Popular Models You Can Run on NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)

Verified open-weights LLMs and image models that fit within NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB)'s 80GB VRAM:

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B

70.6B • 47.6 GB VRAM

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DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B

32.8B • 23.8 GB VRAM

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DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B

14.7B • 11.9 GB VRAM

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DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B

8B • 7.3 GB VRAM

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Dual GPU Showdown: NVIDIA A100 SXM4 (80GB) vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090

Compare memory bandwidth (2039 GB/s vs 1008 GB/s), VRAM headroom (80GB vs 24GB), and inference speed head-to-head.

Launch Showdown Arena

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Model weights are only one part of total VRAM consumption. When you prompt a model, the KV Cache (Key-Value Cache) stores all historical tokens. At 32k or 64k context, standard GQA attention can demand an additional 4GB to 12GB of VRAM! Combined with activation buffers and OS background consumption (0.8GB on Windows), total memory spikes beyond hardware capacity.