Why DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 pressures system RAM
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is Mixture-of-Experts: inference activates 1.6B active/token, but VRAM/RAM must usually hold the full ~13B expert set for fast routing. At Q4 the weight slab is ~7.3GB before KV (~0GB at 8K) and ~6GB OS/runtime overhead — totaling ~13.3GB raw, rounded to a 16GB kit. Stretching toward the full 1M-token window multiplies KV far faster than weights; that is the usual “I bought enough RAM for the model but still OOM” failure on DeepSeek MoE pages.
What RAM kit to buy
A 16GB dual-channel kit is enough for quantized DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 at modest context. Still prefer 2× matched SO-DIMM/UDIMM sticks; 1x RTX 4060 Ti (16GB) or RTX 4070 Ti Super (16GB) covers the 16GB VRAM Single GPU GPU profile. If you chat with long pastes, jump a tier before the KV cache forces paging.
Workload notes
DeepSeek checkpoints such as DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 are popular in GGUF community quants; watch for sparse-attention / MLA variants that change KV growth vs plain dense transformers. At 13B, DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is compact enough for laptops and mini-PCs when quantized; dual-channel memory still matters for 1% token latency. Release window noted as 2025/2026; always re-check the model card before buying hardware for a specific checkpoint.