Frontier Watch: Model Bench (Strix Halo, 128GB)

New and interesting models, measured on the same 128GB Strix Halo box with the same discipline as everything else on this site: identity-logged runs, both backends where applicable, and a context-depth axis that goes as deep as the model and the memory allow. Entry criteria: fits in 128GB, and either a major release, a reader request, or a use case I run myself.

Drift note: Deep dense prompt-processing cells vary a few percent day to day on this hardware. Deltas within a run matter more than absolute digits across days.

Configuration legend: cfg-A means amd_iommu=on iommu=pt, used before 2026-07-18. cfg-B means amd_iommu=off, the current production configuration.

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct UD-Q6_K_XL

Model source: Unsloth GGUF

Measurement date: 2026-07-19. Config: cfg-B. Stock rows use upstream merge-base build 10060 at commit 635cdd5fc. Fixed rows use build 10072 at commit a18067a85.

The fixed q8_0 rows come from Nathanw1014's community fork, branch strix-halo-fa-fixes, which is under upstream discussion. Stock rows use the upstream merge-base. These measurements cover throughput only, not output quality.

The stock Vulkan f16 run at 128k produced no valid raw JSON after a device loss and is omitted. The 192k and 262k q8_0 rows reached the model's deeper context range. The fixed ROCm f16 row at 262k is included as the recorded capacity contrast.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B UD-Q5_K_XL

Model source: Unsloth MTP GGUF

Measurement date: 2026-07-19. Config: cfg-B. Stock rows use upstream merge-base build 10060 at commit 635cdd5fc. Fixed rows use build 10072 at commit a18067a85.

The fixed q8_0 rows come from Nathanw1014's community fork, branch strix-halo-fa-fixes, which is under upstream discussion. Stock rows use the upstream merge-base. These measurements cover throughput only, not output quality.

Changelog

2026-07-23: page created, initial data from tuning series parts 1-2 and the KV verification