The MoE models hold up better on old hardware, but the dense models like this post promotes are in fact better. This isn't unique to Qwen. Are the dense models better-enough to use given the performance costs? It depends on what you are doing.

If a model runs fast enough for your use case and does exactly what you need it to, then you don't need a much slower model that might be more accurate. If you do anything more complicated, the dense models become more necessary and they are much more computationally heavy by comparison.

On your hardware an Unsloth quant of Gemma 4 26BA4B QAT would likely give you better results, but because it has 4B active parameters instead of Qwen's 3B active parameters, it will probably run slower.