Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B vs Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

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.

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

A strong mid-size cousin for coding, agent steps and reading images or video, with thinking you can switch off per request. Alibaba's 4-bit build needs about 95 GB, which fits one 128 GB unified-memory machine, and several providers host it. The main risk is silence, with no safety results, agent guidance or answers from Alibaba.

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)

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B

1. Quickest start on a 128 GB machine is ollama run qwen3.5:122b (Q4_K_M, 81 GB of files, about 97 GB with context)
2. Alibaba's 4-bit build serves with vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-GPTQ-Int4 --max-model-len 262144 --reasoning-parser qwen3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder --quantization moe_wna16, though that kernel isn't documented for AMD gfx1151
3. Use the qwen3_coder tool parser and the qwen3 reasoning parser, as the card's commands do
4. Turn thinking off with "chat_template_kwargs": {"enable_thinking": false} in the request body, since it's on by default and /think and /nothink aren't supported
5. Sampling per the card is temperature 0.6, top_p 0.95 and top_k 20 when thinking, and temperature 0.7, top_p 0.8, top_k 20 and presence_penalty 1.5 without
6. Keep the context at 128K or more if you rely on thinking, and turn on YaRN only past 262,144 tokens
7. Add --language-model-only in vLLM to skip the vision encoder and free memory for the KV cache when you only need text
8. Validate any JSON it returns, since structured output isn't documented