DeepSeek-R1 Distill 14B
14B parameter open-weight model. Qwen2.5 distillation of R1. Strong reasoning and coding at 14B. Q4_K_M weights measured at 8.99 GB, confirming the 9.0 GB estimate this entry already carried. Q4 tight in 12 GB; comfortable in 16 GB VRAM. On an RTX 3080 (10 GB) 10% of resident bytes spilled to host and generation ran 30.51 tok/s, 36% of the card's bandwidth ceiling (measured 2026-08-07, Ollama 0.32.5).
DeepSeek · DeepSeek-R1
Model overview
DeepSeek-R1 Distill 14B is a Qwen2.5-based distillation of DeepSeek's R1 reasoning model, sized to bring stronger step-by-step reasoning to hardware that can't run the full-size R1. At 14B it's a meaningful step up in reasoning and coding depth over the 8B distill, and its agent-workflow strength tag makes it a reasonable pick for tool-use and multi-step planning tasks. Q4 quantization runs tight on a 12 GB GPU and comfortably on 16 GB, so plan for the larger card if you want headroom for longer reasoning chains. As with all distilled models, expect solid but not frontier-level reasoning compared to the original R1.
Editorial review
VRAM figures are empirical estimates. Actual usage varies by runtime, context length, and system configuration. Verify on your specific hardware before production use.
Will DeepSeek-R1 Distill 14B run on your machine?
DeepSeek-R1 Distill 14B is 14B parameters and needs 10.5 GB of VRAM at Q4_K_M — 9 GB of weights plus 1.5 GB of runtime overhead for the inference server itself.
VRAM by quantization
| Quantization | Weights | Needs (with overhead) | Quality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 9 GB | 10.5 GB | good |
| Q8_0 | 15.5 GB | 17 GB | high |
| FP16 | 28 GB | 29.5 GB | reference |
Fit on common hardware at Q4_K_M
| Hardware | Memory the model can use | System RAM | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU Only | None (CPU only) | 16 GB | CPU offload |
| RTX 4060 Laptop | 8 GB | 16 GB | CPU offload |
| RTX 3060 (12GB) | 12 GB | 32 GB | Tight |
| RTX 4060 Ti (16GB) | 16 GB | 32 GB | Comfortable |
| RTX 3090 | 24 GB | 64 GB | Comfortable |
| Apple Silicon (Unified Memory) 36 GB | 27 GB of 36 GB | 36 GB | Comfortable |
Comfortable means VRAM clears the requirement by 2 GB or more. Tight means it covers the requirement with no margin. CPU offload means the model does not fit in VRAM but system RAM is at least 1.6× the weights, so it will run at reduced speed — expect roughly 1–5 tokens per second. Figures are weights plus a fixed runtime overhead and exclude KV-cache growth, which scales with context length.
Apple Silicon shares one pool of memory between the system and the GPU, so a model cannot use all of it. These rows apply the same 75% usable fraction the Compatibility Checker uses, which is why a 36 GB Mac is graded on less than 36 GB.
Need more hardware for DeepSeek-R1 Distill 14B? Open the PC Builder for the 13B / 14B tier →
Ready to run this model locally?
Find a compatible interface in our Local AI Tools directory →