What hardware do you need to run Gemma 4 31B it?
Gemma 4 31B it at Q4_K_M is 20 GB of weights, with a context ceiling of 256k tokens. Not yet rated: released after our last ratings pass. Sizes and prices are current.
How good is it, really?
On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3 it scores 15 (reasoning mode; 14 without), which puts it in the Haiku-class band. In the same band as Anthropic's cheap, fast tier. Every current OpenAI model scores above this band. Score source. See the whole table.
- Summarising — not rated
- Translation — not rated
- Everyday coding — not rated
- Reasoning & maths — not rated
- Agentic work — not rated
What it costs either way
Renting the same model costs $0.09 per million input tokens and $0.34 per million output (OpenRouter, cheapest active endpoint, checked 2026-09-03). Buying a machine only beats that if you use it hard enough, for long enough, that the hardware price divides down below the rental bill.
Machines that run it
| Machine | Price | Speed at 32k | Pay-back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strix Halo Framework Desktop, 64GB | $1,959 | 7.4 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 203 years | Run the numbers |
| Mac mini M5 Pro, 48GB | $2,299 | 8.9 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 212 years | Run the numbers |
| Mac Studio M5 Max, 36GB | $2,499 | 13 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 186 years | Run the numbers |
| MacBook Pro M5 Pro (16-inch), 48GB | $3,599 | 8.9 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 332 years | Run the numbers |
| DGX Spark GB10 Grace Blackwell, 128GB | $4,699 | 7.9 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 516 years | Run the numbers |
One machine per family, cheapest first. Speeds are measured where a public benchmark exists and estimated from memory bandwidth otherwise; the calculator says which for any configuration.
The specifics
- Parameters
- 31.3B
- Quantisation
- Q4_K_M
- Weights on disk
- 20 GB
- KV cache
- 6.2 GB at 32k context — 5 of every 6 layers use a 1024-token sliding window.
- Maximum context
- 256k tokens (256k)
- Licence
- Apache 2.0
- Sources
- source 1, source 2, source 3