Qwen 27B Beats 35B in Coding on 32GB GPUs, But Local Models Still Can't Self-Check
WSTangoDelta · reddit · 2026-08-12
A developer conducted an in-depth test on a 32GB GPU to determine whether Qwen 27B (Q8) or 35B (Q6) is better for coding, using complex integration tasks involving concurrency, retries, and state management.
Key Findings:
- 27B Wins: The 27B model solved 3 out of 6 difficult tasks, while the 35B solved only 2. Despite the 35B being 6x faster, the 27B proved more accurate.
- Scaling Up Fails: Larger models like Qwen 72B and Llama 3.3 70B performed worse, solving 1 or even 0 tasks.
- Frontier APIs Still Best: Control models like GPT and Claude went 5/6 but still missed subtle invariants.
Conclusion: Local models are highly useful for drafting and debugging, but for consequential integration work, they cannot be trusted to self-certify correctness without independent checks.
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