MiniCPM-V 4.7 35B-A3B vs Qwen3.8-27B

MiniCPM-V 4.7 35B-A3B

No score change since it was listed.

Qwen3.8-27B

• +4.9 on 21 October 2026: checklist

MiniCPM-V 4.7 35B-A3B

A vision-language cousin for images and video that fits a 24 to 32 GB machine from OpenBMB's own GGUF, under plain Apache 2.0, with a publisher that answers. The card says little about limits, training data or how tool calls come back, so test the tool format in your runtime before relying on it.

Qwen3.8-27B

A dense cousin for coding and agent work with image and video input that runs almost anywhere. Ollama's 4-bit build needs about 22 GB, and seven providers host it for agents without the hardware. The main risk is that nobody at Alibaba answers, there are no safety results or agent guidance, and the tool format is only in the template.

MiniCPM-V 4.7 35B-A3B

1. Start it with llama-server -hf openbmb/MiniCPM-V-4.7-35B-A3B-gguf:Q4_K_M --jinja, or ollama run openbmb/minicpm-v4.7:35b-a3b
2. For image input in llama.cpp add mmproj-model-f16.gguf, or the 4x projector for more visual detail at a higher cost
3. The GGUF files at the repository root have thinking off. Use the files in thinking/ when you want the trace
4. With Transformers pass enable_thinking to apply_chat_template, and pass downsample_mode to both apply_chat_template and generate
5. Use temperature 0.7, top_p 0.95 and top_k 100 in instruct mode, as the card recommends
6. Check tool calls in your runtime first, since the card names no parser. The template uses the Qwen3.5 function-block format
7. Validate JSON output yourself, since structured output isn't documented

Qwen3.8-27B

1. Quickest start is ollama run qwen3.8, about 18 GB of files
2. On our reference machine use BF16 with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B --max-model-len 131072 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder, since FP8 on gfx1151 isn't documented
3. Use the qwen3_coder tool parser, SGLang's cookbook says the Hermes parser leaves its calls unparsed
4. Thinking is on by default, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks, and read the reasoning from reasoning_content
5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
6. Sampling per the card is temperature 1.0 and top_p 0.95 when thinking, temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8 and presence_penalty 1.5 without
7. Preserved thinking keeps earlier reasoning in the context unless preserve_thinking is false, which grows long agent sessions
8. Turn on YaRN only beyond 262,144 tokens, the card warns static YaRN can cost quality on short texts
9. Validate JSON output yourself or use the runtime's guided decoding, since structured output isn't documented