Best Ornith 1.5 9B quant for your GPU

4 quantized files of ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B (9.2B): accuracy, tool calls and speed measured; KLD vs the BF16 original pending.

ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-9B (MIT). Per its model card, built on Qwen3.5 with continued pre-training and RL post-training; same hybrid architecture as Qwen3.5 9B (32 layers, 8 full attention + 24 linear attention). Quants from the official ornith-ai GGUF repo, which only has Q4_K_M, Q5_K_M, Q6_K and Q8_0 (no Q2/Q3). Tested with thinking disabled.

KLD pending. KL divergence vs the BF16 reference is queued on our Apple M2 Pro test Mac and will be added here when measured. Until then, picks for this model are ranked by measured accuracy (GSM8K + MMLU + ARC-C, 500 items, 95% CI) with tool calls as tie-break.

Quality vs file size

Left: KLD pending. Right: accuracy on all 500 items (GSM8K + MMLU + ARC-C). Error bars = 95% intervals. Download PNG to share.

Ornith 1.5 9B: KLD and accuracy vs file size for 4 GGUF quants, with 95% error bars

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Recommendation by VRAM

"Best" = highest measured accuracy (500 items pooled) among files that fit fully on the GPU (file + 8192-token KV cache), tool-call score as tie-breaker. KLD pending.

8GB GPU

Best accuracy that fits
Q5_K_M by ornith-ai
File size
6.19 GB
KLD
pending
Accuracy (500 items)
87.4% (84.2–90.0)
Tool calls
89.0%
Accuracy
tied with best
Generation
90 t/s full GPU
Ornith-1.5-9B-Q5_K_M.gguf

Fastest that fits: Q4_K_M (ornith-ai, 99 t/s, acc 87.2%, KLD pending)

12GB GPU

Best accuracy that fits
Q5_K_M by ornith-ai
File size
6.19 GB
KLD
pending
Accuracy (500 items)
87.4% (84.2–90.0)
Tool calls
89.0%
Accuracy
tied with best
Generation
90 t/s full GPU
Ornith-1.5-9B-Q5_K_M.gguf

Fastest that fits: Q4_K_M (ornith-ai, 99 t/s, acc 87.2%, KLD pending)

16GB GPU

Best accuracy that fits
Q5_K_M by ornith-ai
File size
6.19 GB
KLD
pending
Accuracy (500 items)
87.4% (84.2–90.0)
Tool calls
89.0%
Accuracy
tied with best
Generation
90 t/s full GPU
Ornith-1.5-9B-Q5_K_M.gguf

Fastest that fits: Q4_K_M (ornith-ai, 99 t/s, acc 87.2%, KLD pending)

All Ornith 1.5 9B quants

QuantPublisherSizeFitsKLD meanKLD p99Same topTool callsGSM8KMMLUARC-CPP t/sGen t/sRun
Q4_K_M ornith-ai 5.38 GB 8GB+ pending — — 87.5% 88.7 ≈
83–93
80.0
74–85
95.3 ≈
91–98
4503 99 settings & logs
Q5_K_M ornith-ai 6.19 GB 8GB+ pending — — 89.0% 90.7
85–94
78.0 ≈
72–83
96.7
92–99
4589 90 settings & logs
Q6_K ornith-ai 7.04 GB 12GB+ pending — — 89.0% 89.3 ≈
83–93
78.5 ≈
72–84
96.7
92–99
3937 83 settings & logs
Q8_0 ornith-ai 9.11 GB 12GB+ pending — — 88.5% 89.3 ≈
83–93
75.5 ≈
69–81
96.7
92–99
4828 65 settings & logs

Accuracy cells: % correct, with the 95% confidence interval (Wilson) underneath. ≈ = statistically tied with the best quant of the same model (intervals overlap). ▼ below = clearly worse than that model's best quant (intervals do not overlap). Ties are not ranked: sorting by an accuracy column puts tied quants together and orders them by KLD. How accuracy is measured.

GB = GiB (1024³ bytes). KLD, tool calls and speeds from Ghost (RTX 5070 12GB, CUDA, Ryzen 7 5800X, 64GB DDR4). On a different GPU, expect generation speed to scale roughly with memory bandwidth. Task accuracy (GSM8K / MMLU / ARC-C, % correct on fixed subsets of 150 / 200 / 150 items, frozen suite quantdiff-lmeval-v1) was measured with the same GGUF files and llama.cpp build on Ghost (CUDA, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 12 GB (64 GB RAM)), minipro (Metal, Apple M2 Pro (Mac mini), 12-core CPU, 19-core GPU, 32 GB unified memory). Accuracy depends on the weights, not on the GPU, but small numeric differences between backends can flip individual answers. With these sample sizes, differences under about 5 points are within noise (± shown on run pages). Methodology.

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