HARDWARE FIT CHECK • Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct + 2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM)7.87 GB / 48 GB VRAM

Can I Run Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct on 2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM)?

Full VRAM footprint analysis, tokens/sec generation benchmark, and copy-paste Ollama & vLLM runtime commands for running Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (8B) on 2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM) (48 GB).

✅ Runs 100% in GPU VRAM (Optimal Headroom)7.87 GB (16%)~109 t/s

Model & Target Hardware

interactive
Fast 8GB–12GB GPU Chat, Classification & Local Agents
Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct on 2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM)

✓ Fits Comfortably in VRAM

✓ FITS IN VRAM
Required VRAM
7.87 GB
16% of hardware capacity (48 GB)
Est. Decode Speed
~109 tok/s
Dense model @ 936 GB/s
Available Headroom
+40.13 GB
Safe for OS display & full context
Memory Allocation & Headroom
7.87 GB allocated of 48 GB capacity
16% utilized
Weights: 4.8 GB
KV: (32K): 2.15 GB
Overhead: 0.92 GB
Free Headroom: +40.13 GB
⚡ Architecture & Throughput Transparency: Single-user decode speed (~109 tok/s) is memory-bandwidth bound at batch size = 1 on 2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM) (936 GB/s). Prompt prefill / TTFT (~1,581 tok/s) is compute-bound and utilizes GPU Tensor cores. Actual latency varies with FlashAttention-2 and runtime engine (Ollama/vLLM/llama.cpp).
OLLAMA_FLASH_ATTENTION=1 OLLAMA_KV_CACHE_TYPE=q8_0 ollama run llama3.1:8b

Quantization Precision Matrix

32K ctx • KV: Q8_0
QuantizationWeightsKV CacheTotal VRAMEst. SpeedFit Status
FP1616 bpw16 GB2.15 GB19.46 GB (41%)~35 t/sFITS
Q8_08.5 bpw8.48 GB2.15 GB11.68 GB (24%)~64 t/sFITS
Q6_K6.56 bpw6.56 GB2.15 GB9.69 GB (20%)~82 t/sFITS
Q5_K_M5.68 bpw5.68 GB2.15 GB8.78 GB (18%)~93 t/sFITS
Q4_K_M4.8 bpw4.8 GB2.15 GB7.87 GB (16%)~109 t/sFITS
FP44.25 bpw4.24 GB2.15 GB7.29 GB (15%)~121 t/sFITS
IQ3_XS3.3 bpw3.28 GB2.15 GB6.29 GB (13%)~152 t/sFITS

Local Hardware Configurations & Pricing

High-bandwidth VRAM specs and current market prices
Multi-GPU Rig48 GB VRAM

2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM)

Best price-to-VRAM homelab rig for 70B Q4_K_M & Qwen 3.8 27B Q8

936 GB/s700W TDP
Consumer GPU32 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB GDDR7)

Maximum tokens/sec on 27B–35B models & Blackwell FP4 quantization

1792 GB/s575W TDP
Consumer GPU24 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24GB GDDR6X)

The 24GB CUDA enthusiast standard for 14B–32B Q4_K_M models

1008 GB/s450W TDP
Consumer GPU16 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 (16GB GDDR7)

Blazing fast 8B–14B coding models with FP4/Q6_K precision

960 GB/s360W TDP

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