HARDWARE FIT CHECK • Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct + NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7)7.87 GB / 12 GB VRAM

Can I Run Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7)?

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 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7) (12 GB).

✓ FITS IN VRAM7.87 GB (66%)~86 t/s

Model & Target Hardware

interactive
Fast 8GB–12GB GPU Chat, Classification & Local Agents
GPU Topology / Quantity:Single GPU / Unified SoC
Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7)

✓ Fits Comfortably in VRAM

✓ FITS IN VRAM
Required VRAM
7.87 GB
66% of hardware capacity (12 GB)
Est. Decode Speed
~86 tok/s
Dense model @ 672 GB/s
Available Headroom
+4.13 GB
Safe for OS display & full context
Memory Allocation & Headroom
7.87 GB allocated of 12 GB capacity
66% utilized
Weights: 4.8 GB
KV: (32K): 2.15 GB
Overhead: 0.92 GB
Free Headroom: +4.13 GB
⚡ Architecture & Throughput Transparency: Single-user decode speed (~86 tok/s) is memory-bandwidth bound at batch size = 1 on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7) (672 GB/s). Prompt prefill / TTFT (~1,247 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

Local Hardware Configurations & Pricing

High-bandwidth VRAM specs and current market prices
Consumer GPU
32 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB GDDR7)

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

1792 GB/s575W TDP
Consumer GPU
24 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24GB GDDR6X)

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

1008 GB/s450W TDP
Multi-GPU Rig
48 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 GPU
12 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7)

High-efficiency 12GB entry point with FP4 tensor acceleration

672 GB/s250W TDP

Quantization Precision Matrix

32K ctx • KV: Q8_0
QuantizationWeightsKV CacheTotal VRAMEst. SpeedFit Status
FP1616 bpw16 GB2.15 GB19.46 GB (162%)0 t/sOOM
Q8_08.5 bpw8.48 GB2.15 GB11.68 GB (97%)~51 t/sFITS
Q6_K6.56 bpw6.56 GB2.15 GB9.69 GB (81%)~64 t/sFITS
Q5_K_M5.68 bpw5.68 GB2.15 GB8.78 GB (73%)~73 t/sFITS
Q4_K_M4.8 bpw4.8 GB2.15 GB7.87 GB (66%)~86 t/sFITS
FP44.25 bpw4.24 GB2.15 GB7.29 GB (61%)~96 t/sFITS
IQ3_XS3.3 bpw3.28 GB2.15 GB6.29 GB (52%)~120 t/sFITS

Export Full Architecture & Infrastructure Spec

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FAQ & Reference

Frequently Asked Questions: Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7)

How much VRAM does Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct need on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7)?

At standard 4-bit quantization (Q4_K_M) with 32K context, Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct requires 7.87 GB of total VRAM (weights + KV cache + CUDA runtime overhead).

What inference speed will Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct achieve on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7)?

Based on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12GB GDDR7)'s 672 GB/s memory bandwidth, expected decode speed is approximately 86 tokens per second.

Can I expand context beyond 32K tokens?

Each additional 32K tokens of context requires additional KV cache memory. For longer context windows, consider 8-bit or 4-bit KV cache quantization.