Qwen3 32B vs Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct

Qwen3 32B and Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct both score 7 on the intelligence index. The cheapest machine here that runs Qwen3 32B is the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB, at $1,299. Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct runs on the Framework Desktop, 32GB at $1,269, $30 less. The Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB is priced as the card alone, without the PC around it. On the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB, the cheapest machine here that runs both, Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct is about 1.4× quicker: 28 tok/s against 20, Qwen3 32B's measured and the other estimated from memory bandwidth. At 500k tokens a day the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB pays for itself in 138 years running Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct, against 150 years running Qwen3 32B.

Run Qwen3 32B on the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB · or Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct on the Framework Desktop, 32GB

Ratings are coarse on purpose: they say what a model is usable for, not where it places to the decimal.

Jump to: Side by side on the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB · How much use it takes to pay for the machine · Machines that run one and not the other · The assumptions behind both columns

Side by side on the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB

The table above gives each model the cheapest machine that runs it, and those are two different machines, so nothing in it is a like-for-like race. The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB is the cheapest machine here that runs both, so this is the pair doing the same work on the same hardware.

Run Qwen3 32B on the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB · or Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct

How much use it takes to pay for the machine

Everything above is at 500k tokens a day. Pay-back moves with how much you actually run, so here are both models at the five levels of use the calculator names, on the Radeon AI PRO R9700, 32GB. Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct pays for it sooner at every level of use, so which of them to run does not turn on how hard you work it.

Run Qwen3 32B at 20M tokens a day · or Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct

Machines that run one and not the other

Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct needs 20 GB of memory at 32k of context and Qwen3 32B needs 28 GB. That puts Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct on 4 of the 37 machines priced here that Qwen3 32B does not, starting at $1,269.

Qwen3 32B is also head to head with Llama 3.1 8B Instruct above it on the leaderboard and Qwen3.8 27B, the current Qwen nearest it in size. One more model needs much the same memory: DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B. Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct is also head to head with Qwen3 14B below it on the leaderboard and Devstral Small 2 24B, the current Mistral nearest it in size. One more model needs much the same memory: Gemma 3 27B it.

The assumptions behind both columns

Both columns use the same usage: 500k tokens a day at 15:1 input to output, 32k of context, $0.17 per kWh, and today's API prices held flat. Speeds marked estimated are worked out from memory bandwidth rather than measured, and pay-back scales with them. Where nobody rents an open model by the token, its API prices are the nearest hosted model's, named beside them. Machines are the 37 here with a published price that are still sold. Change any of it in the calculator.

More head to head: every machine that runs Qwen3 32B · every machine that runs Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct · every other match-up · both against the frontier · the quickest pay-back at each level of use