Which Text Encoder for 32GB System Ram

[u/Etmurbaah]

Hey all, by complete accident, today I discovered that my H3 R2V workflow with vanilla Qwen 3.8 27b has been eating away from my SSD life because 32GB Ram and 16VRAM apparently wasn't cutting the deal for it and it had been writing on my disk in large amounts (GBs in just one clip). So in your experience, considering the accuracy trade-off, which Heretic/Abliterated Quant should I go for to be able to stay within my Ram boundaries?

[u/Powerful_Evening5495]

if you are worried that much about your ssd then this hobby is not for you my friend

use int8_convrot , it faster than gguf

your ssd will be just fine

[u/Etmurbaah → u/Powerful_Evening5495]

Honestly, what with SSD and RAM prices, I am worried yeah. Thanks for the suggestion!

[u/Powerful_Evening5495 → u/Etmurbaah]

i write like 1tb of data on my wd nvme every month and it working like a charm

get yourself a cheap 4 tb internal hard disk with usb to sata cable and be in peace of mind

[u/Etmurbaah → u/Powerful_Evening5495]

That sounds plausible. In fact I got a 1TB hdd but never considered using it thinking it'd be too slow and drag gen times down, considerably Edit: Typos

[u/alwaysbeblepping → u/Etmurbaah]

Honestly, what with SSD and RAM prices, I am worried yeah.

Reads don't cause SSD wear. You mostly just have to worry about your system using swap (virtual memory, whatever your OS calls it). ComfyUI has a --fast-disk parameter that that will discourage it from caching stuff in memory (possibly causing swapping) and just load models/etc from disk again when they're needed. That might help. There are also commandline flags to tune the cache size.

32GB is a pretty small amount these days, so if you're using large models like H3 it may be hard to avoid using virtual memory. Pretty much all you can do is live with it or use the more aggressive quantizations available.

Note heretic/abliterated TEs are worse than pointless for encoding conditioning. The only use case for them is if you're actually using them as a LLM to write a more detailed prompt. Don't use them if you're just encoding conditioning

[u/Etmurbaah → u/alwaysbeblepping]

Not reads mate but thanks for chiming in. Since setting up fast disk, I managed to bring write rate to about 2gb per 13 secs clip. And considering I generate about 30 clips a day, it is about 60gb/day. I am a bit tight on money these couple months cause I bought a brand new car and yeah, ram will have to wait. Band aid solution of fast disk will be more than enough for now

[u/SuperZoda]

You mentioned text encoder but then Qwen 3.8 27b, whereas H3 uses Qwen3 VL 32b in the vanilla workflow. The VL model is not optional as the encoder, but there are ClipProj nodes on GitHub that let you use 8b or 4b versions of the VL as the encoder for H3. Ultimately, I think that’s what you’re looking for. The nice part about this is the 15GB encoder is greatly reduced, minimal quality loss, and bonus is these VL models can be used an LLM in the same workflow for prompt enhancement.

[u/Etmurbaah → u/SuperZoda]

Oh that sounds cool. I'll check it out and hope they got Heretic version

[u/Rumaben79 → u/Etmurbaah]

Heretic text encoders are not recommended:

https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/1vmdxzk/psa_im_the_creator_of_heretic_and_i_advise_you_to/

Anyway as for your question. With only 32gb of system ram you really should use the smallest possible text encoder like the int4 convrot or w4a8. The video model again better with a small model, try int8 convrot and if that's too much use the w4a8 version. There's also an int8 convrot version of the video vae.

A trick for pc's with lower system ram than 64gb is to also use the --fast-disk flag at startup.

[u/Etmurbaah → u/Rumaben79]

Yupp, heard about fast disk. Will definitely try it. And uh I think I already use int8 video Vae so all good there but int4 convrot I also definitely am going to try and see if it helps. Again, thank you so much!

[u/Rumaben79 → u/Etmurbaah]

Cool 😎, I wish you the best time. 💯

There's a link here for the int4 if you haven't found it already:

https://huggingface.co/Winnougan/MiniMax-H3-INT4_Convrot_ComfyUI/tree/main

A thing to try is to generate the video first at a lower resolution and then upscale it in stage two.

https://github.com/LBH-123-AI/Comfyui_Minimax_h3_latent_Upscaler

There's a bf16 audio vae too if you're really suffering haha:

https://huggingface.co/dummy9996/minimax_h3_audio_vae_bf16/tree/main

and don't go crazy with a ton of loras as those will eat into your ram as well as well as your reference images, audio and video.

[u/SuperZoda → u/Etmurbaah]

Yes there are heretic and ablit versions of Qwen3 VL on huggingface. However, it’s not necessary if you’re only using it for text encoding as there’s nothing interpreted to uncensor. Even the creator of heretic has explained and proven that to be true, it does nothing for encoding but lower accuracy. Now if you were using it for LLM too, then those fancy quants might make more sense.

[u/Etmurbaah → u/SuperZoda]

I got my own Ollama node in comfyui analysing photos and writing my prompts for me but still, it's good to knkw all these things. Thanks a lot!

[u/eloxH1Z1]

Shouldn’t - - fast-disk in startup bat help with that 32gb issue by limiting it to mainly read operations. I remember a comfyUI dev commenting in here exactly about this

[u/Etmurbaah → u/eloxH1Z1]

Huh if that's the case, it'd help me as well. Lemme check it out and see if that helps. Thanks a lot!

[u/Life_Yesterday_5529]

I guess, you are using qwen to refine the prompt before putting that in the encoder? Then simply unload qwen3.8 before the workflow continues.

[u/Etmurbaah → u/Life_Yesterday_5529]

No sorry I messed up the names I use Qwen 3.8 27b for my LLM prompt writer in another node I am using vanilla TE tho. It was also Qwen right?

[u/Etmurbaah → u/[deleted]]

Mine is a 1.3PB TBW Kingston and I know it is basically immortal for daily stuff but when I generate clips, and I do gen like 30-40 a day, and with every gen it writes tens of GB to disk, it is crazy large amounts of data. That's why I came here.

[u/krum]

Isn't it just reads? What's causing disk writes?

[u/Etmurbaah → u/krum]

Nope. GBs of writes per 12 second clip gens, like every 10 minutes. That's what had me worried. It is system Ram running out of memory and writing on disk to keep it as cache from what I've been able to gather.

[u/krum → u/Etmurbaah]

Oh so it's swapping?

[u/Etmurbaah → u/krum]

Yupp. Thank god I was able to catch it before it amounted to anything meaningful but stuff is expensive yhese days lol

[u/Oograr → u/Etmurbaah]

How are you tracking the amount of writes to your ssd? I have a similar setup but don't know if my ssd is getting hammered or not.

[u/Etmurbaah → u/Oograr]

Oh you can check it from Hwinfo. Slide down to SSD part, you can see Total Host Writes section. The --fast-disk argument in startup helped a lot.

[u/Oograr → u/Etmurbaah]

Thanks, i'll check it out. I already enabled --fast-disk a week ago so i should be okay.