Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B vs Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

A small agent cousin, 3B active parameters, with trained parallel tool calls, a thinking switch and up to 1M tokens of context, under a permissive licence. It runs in about 23 GB from the GGUF or Ollama builds, and NVIDIA's NVFP4 build needs NVIDIA GPUs. The main risks are no published safety results and one answered question across two repositories.

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

A Qwen3.8-27B cousin tuned to think less per turn in long agent loops, with an MTP head for speculative decoding in llama.cpp. It fits 24 GB with Jackrong's 4-bit GGUF. The risks are one person's experimental release with no safety work, training traces taken from Claude and GPT, and a tool format that differs from Qwen's.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B

1. Quickest start is ollama run nemotron-3.5-lightning, about 19 to 25 GB of files depending on the platform
2. On the reference machine use llama-server -hf ggml-org/NVIDIA-Nemotron-3.5-Lightning-30B-A3B-GGUF:Q4_0 --jinja, since the card's Q4_K_M tag doesn't exist there and NVFP4 needs NVIDIA GPUs
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, as the card says
5. Thinking is on by default. Pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false for short tasks
6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, which vLLM's nemotron_v3 parser reads so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
7. Go past 262,144 tokens only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576) and enough memory

Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2

1. Quickest start is llama-server -hf Jackrong/Qwopus3.8-27B-Flash-V2-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja, about 17 GB, and add mmproj-F32.gguf for images
2. The card's tests used Q5_K_M with the bundled MTP head and --spec-type draft-mtp in llama.cpp
3. The template asks for tool calls as JSON inside tool_call tags, so use a Hermes-style parser (vLLM's hermes), not Qwen3.8's qwen3_coder
4. For coding the card recommends enable_thinking true, reasoning_effort xhigh and temperature 0.3, which you must pass yourself, since generation_config.json says 1.0
5. reasoning_effort takes xhigh (default), medium or low, and any other value makes the template raise an error
6. Earlier reasoning stays in the context unless preserve_thinking is false
7. Cap max_tokens, since a report says it loops more than V1