Can NVIDIA A100 80GB run Qwen 2.5 72B?
72B parameter LLM model on 80GB HBM2e
VRAM Requirements
Qwen 2.5 72B is a 72B parameter model. At full precision (FP16), it requires 144GB of VRAM. Your NVIDIA A100 80GB has 80GB, so you'll need to quantize it to 8-bit (Q8) to fit.
Maximum quality, no quantization
Near-lossless, ~50% size reduction
Good quality, ~75% size reduction
Recommended system RAM: 160GB DDR5 (2x GPU VRAM minimum for model overflow)
What This Means in Practice
Running Qwen 2.5 72B at 8-bit quantization on NVIDIA A100 80GB gives you virtually identical quality to full precision while using roughly half the VRAM. Most users cannot distinguish Q8 output from FP16. This is the recommended precision for daily use — it's the best balance of quality and resource usage.
How to Set It Up
Step 1: Install Ollama
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | shOllama is the easiest way to run local LLMs. Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Step 2: Download and run Qwen 2.5 72B
ollama run qwen2.5:72bThis downloads the model (~72GB). First run takes a few minutes.
Step 3: Verify GPU is being used
nvidia-smiCheck that VRAM usage increases when the model loads. You should see ~72GB used.
NVIDIA A100 80GB Specs
Other GPUs That Run Qwen 2.5 72B
Other LLM Models on NVIDIA A100 80GB
About Qwen 2.5 72B
Top open LLM for reasoning. Similar requirements to Llama 70B.