Folks, like many of you, I used to look at the Strata posts and was extremely skeptical. But yesterday, with the help of DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, I compiled Strata on my machine, and honestly I'm blown away by the speed.

With llama.cpp master I got a maximum of 700 t/s PP and 23 t/s TG. With Strata, using Unsloth's UD-Q3\_K\_XL quant, I'm getting \~1,650 t/s PP and \~38 to 61 t/s TG depending on context, with no tool-calling errors, everything running great in OpenCode at KV fp16 and 256k context. Phenomenal, and partly unbelievable.

I'm not a programmer. I just "vibe" with AI. People say Strata is a mess; whether it really is, I don't know, but my initial experience has been amazing. From here on out, it's AI. I asked it to summarize the data and what it did to run the Unsloth quant on Strata.

By the way, the quant that Strata downloads and recommends, I didn't like it. It threw silly errors and seemed to have lower quality, though it was also even faster. For my use case I prefer to keep Unsloth's, because it's better: a bit slower, but more accurate for my workloads.

Hardware summary

• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3090, 24 GB (compute capability 8.6)
• CPU: Intel i5-12600K (10 cores / 16 threads)
• RAM: 128 GB DDR4 @ 3600 MT/s (XMP on)
• Storage: two NVMe SSDs (system + models)
• Power limit: 315 W (card max 365 W)
• CUDA: Toolkit 13.4; compiled for sm_86

Strata stats (Unsloth UD-Q3_K_XL)

|Metric|Strata|llama.cpp master|
|:-|:-|:-|
|PP (prompt)|\~1,650 t/s (≈1,690 at 180k)|up to 700 t/s|
|TG (generation)|38 t/s at 182k context; \~61 t/s short context|23 t/s|
|Context / KV|256k fp16|180k f16|
|Expert cache hit|\~76%|n/a|
|Speculative (MTP) accept|\~76%|n/a|
|Tool calling|no errors, working in OpenCode|n/a|

Quant used: Unsloth UD-Q3\_K\_XL (dynamic quant). Not the quant Strata recommends by default. That one was faster but produced minor errors and (subjectively) lower quality; Unsloth's was chosen for accuracy over speed.

Adaptations needed (quant + Strata)

On the quant:

• Packed with --compat-bf16 (some tensors Strata reads as BF16).

On Strata (recompiled / reconfigured):

• Rebuilt for sm_86 with MMQ (-DSTRATA_MMQ_KQUANTS=ON). This doubles Q4-class prompt speed.
• Disabled STRATA_PF_FUSED=0 in the configs. The fused kernels crashed (illegal memory access) on quantized experts whose "down" type is unsupported.
• Vision encoder moved to the GPU: recompiled strata-vision with CUDA (was CPU-only) and set vision.gpu=true \+ --vram-reserve-mib 700 in all configs.
• Per-model calibration (--pcie-frac, --pool-workers, --spec-min-p) and --expert-profile-save to learn and persist the expert cache.

Adjusted config (this model): context 256k, --kv fp16, --kv-resident 32768, expert cache auto (6,517 slots / \~14 GB), --spec 4, --pcie-frac 0.00, --pool-workers 9, --spec-min-p 0.70.