>You can already performantly run frontier level models on systems with $1600 tier video cards.

Quanted out Qwen 3.8 models are not frontier level. Have you used them for real work? They suck. They are so unsure of themselves due to the quant-lobotomy. They just endlessly loop in thinking even when they have the right decision and then output it when they get to the thinking cap. They score close in benchmarks because most benchmarks don't measure time to complete a task.

I use Qwen quants in production for fast inference but I disable thinking and have them fine tuned for the task. My realtime transcription + translation stack right now is running 5 streams at 380 tok/s.

Running DeepSeek 4.1 Flash at FP4 is going to need at least a 10-15k machine. I'd consider that near frontier level.