DeepSeek V4.1 Flash hands-on tests and comparisons

On OpenRouter, Kimi K3.1 Pro ranks #17 at about $109K spend while DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 ranks #1 at about $78K, meaning Kimi uses 16x fewer tokens yet has higher estimated spend.

The author rebuts claims that opencode's DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is degraded by quantization, noting the official release is already mostly MXFP4 (FP8 for Engram) and that opencode's Dax says it serves the same model as the official API.

A community abliterated GGUF of V4.1 Flash 1017 uses layer-wise mixed quantization to run on 256GB RAM, hitting about 70 tok/s on dual H200 with 93.7% next-token agreement.

IST Austria released a heavily quantized DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash that runs on a single 12GB GPU by offloading to RAM and SSD: about 5 tok/s on an RTX 5070 with 64GB RAM and 8–10 tok/s on an RTX 3060, needing 239GB+ of disk.

Three models take on the same campfire generation challenge, with per-run costs of $0.54 for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, $0.22 for MiniMax and $1.88 for Kimi; viewers judge the visuals.

Citing a 105-bug repair test and the Coding Agent Index, the post shows V4.1 Flash fixing about as many bugs as Opus 5.5 while costing 10-30x less, and shares a routing setup.

On a 3×V100 + 128GB RAM machine, Project Maya decoded the 748B DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at 27.5 vs 22.0 tok/s and prefilled long text at 425 vs 176 tokens/s versus Strata.

A user reports V4.1 Flash is cheap and good for simple tasks but codes about as well as Qwen3.8 Flash, preferring MiniMax 3.1 Flash.

A 3bpw EXL3 quant of DeepSeek V4.1 Flash ran at 224 tok/s on two RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell cards (192GB VRAM total), but needs about 260GiB of system RAM.

The author reviews OpenRouter-style usage data: DeepSeek V4 models, especially Flash, often top weekly token consumption at tens of trillions per week, with Chinese models filling the top six despite trailing Opus 5.5 on benchmarks.

With IQ2_XXS quantization, keeping 91.7GB of expert weights resident in 256GB RAM gives an 8x speedup and cuts short-prompt TTFT from 33s to 0.66s, at the cost of cold start doubling to 552s.

In an AI news roundup, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 at max setting scores 57% on Artificial Analysis' defense-only Cyber Index, ranking first among publicly available models.