Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

Apodex-1.1-mini vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against Apodex-1.1-mini's 61 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Apodex-1.1-mini leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 2870 open weights comparisons

Which one, for what

Apodex-1.1-mini C

Best for Long-running agent tasks with tools on a 32 GB GPU or Mac, or through Apodex's API, under a plain licence

Ahead on

  • Reach, 85 against 75

Also in its favour

  • Rated higher by the reviewer agents, 3.3 against 2.8 out of 5

Watch for

No safety results, and agent guidance only from the harness

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B B

Best for Agents on a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell GPUs that want a long-context, tool-calling reasoning model with documented training data

Ahead on

  • Agent interface, 90 against 85
  • Documentation and upkeep, 65 against 38

Watch for

The card's serving commands pass --trust-remote-code

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runApodex-1.1-miniNemotron 3 Super 120B A12BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%258575Apodex-1.1-mini +10
Risk20%206565even
Agent interface10%108590Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +5
Documentation and upkeep10%103865Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +27
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 66.2/100

Facts side by side

FactApodex-1.1-miniNemotron 3 Super 120B A12B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorApodex AINVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0NVIDIA Nemotron Open Model License
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-08-252026-03-11
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews3.3/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

Apodex-1.1-mini

An agent cousin fine-tuned from Qwen3.5-35B-A3B for long tasks with files, code and tools, with parallel tool calling and about 3B active parameters. It needs 32 GB for Apodex's GGUF, NVFP4 or GPTQ-Int4 builds or about 86 GB in BF16, and Apodex's API serves it too. The main risks are no safety results and no replies from the publisher.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

A long-context agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, a reasoning switch and a full account of its training data, under a free commercial licence. It needs about 100 GB of GPU memory, a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell hardware for NVIDIA's NVFP4. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code and no published safety results.

Before you call either

Apodex-1.1-mini

  1. Serve it with vllm serve apodex/Apodex-1.1-mini --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --reasoning-parser qwen3, or the same parsers in SGLang, so tool calls and reasoning come back parsed
  2. For llama.cpp, llama-server -hf apodex/Apodex-1.1-mini-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja --reasoning-format deepseek, and the card passes the repository's chat_template.jinja with --chat-template-file
  3. Pass tools through the API's tools parameter rather than in the system prompt, as the card asks
  4. The card recommends temperature 1.0, top_p 0.95, repetition_penalty 1.05 and max_tokens up to 32,768
  5. Send your own system prompt, or set identity_mode, since the template otherwise adds an Apodex identity block
  6. The template keeps all earlier reasoning in the context unless preserve_thinking is false, which grows long agent sessions
  7. Thinking is on by default, send chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, a switch the card doesn't mention
  8. The card's Python example has a broken line where it runs the tool (available_toolsname), so fix it to available_tools[name](**args) before running
  9. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

  1. On the reference machine start it with ollama run nemotron-3-super, the 87 GB q4_K_M build, the only one that fits (about 104 GB with the margin)
  2. Raise the Strix Halo GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is far below what it needs
  3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
  4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 for every task, as the card says
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false or low_effort: true in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
  6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
  7. Raise context past 262,144 only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576)

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Apodex-1.1-mini or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B?

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against Apodex-1.1-mini's 61 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. Apodex-1.1-mini leads on reach.

Other comparisons with Apodex-1.1-mini or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

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