HARDWARE BENCHMARK & VRAM ENVELOPE • CONSUMER GPU24 GB VRAM • 936 GB/s

What Models Can Run on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB GDDR6X)?

24 GB VRAM936 GB/s Bandwidth350W TDPMSRP: $1,499Used / eBay: ~$650Cloud: $0.29/hr on Vast.ai

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB GDDR6X) provides 24 GB of usable memory with 936 GB/s memory bandwidth at 350W TDP. The #1 budget 24GB card for local LLMs, running 14B–32B models and Q4 70B quantized.

! PARTIAL OFFLOAD25.22 GB (105%)~7 t/s

Target Hardware & Model

interactive
The premier open-source coding model for single 24GB GPUs (RTX 4090/3090)
Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B Instruct on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB GDDR6X)

! Partial Offload — Slow CPU/RAM Spillover

! PARTIAL OFFLOAD
Required VRAM
25.22 GB
105% of hardware capacity (24 GB)
Est. Decode Speed
~7 tok/s
Dense model @ 936 GB/s
Available Headroom
-1.22 GB
Needs +1.22 GB more VRAM
Memory Allocation & Headroom
25.22 GB allocated of 24 GB capacity
105% utilized
Weights: 19.5 GB
KV: (32K): 4.29 GB
Overhead: 1.43 GB
Deficit: -1.22 GB
Architecture & Throughput Transparency: Single-user decode speed (~7 tok/s) is memory-bandwidth bound at batch size = 1 on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB GDDR6X) (936 GB/s). Prompt prefill / TTFT (~102 tok/s) is compute-bound and utilizes GPU Tensor cores. Actual latency varies with FlashAttention-2 and runtime engine (Ollama/vLLM/llama.cpp).

Quantization Precision Matrix

32K ctx • KV: Q8_0
QuantizationWeightsKV CacheTotal VRAMEst. SpeedFit Status
FP1616 bpw65 GB4.29 GB72.32 GB (301%)0 t/sOOM
Q8_08.5 bpw34.45 GB4.29 GB40.7 GB (170%)0 t/sOOM
Q6_K6.56 bpw26.65 GB4.29 GB32.62 GB (136%)0 t/sOOM
Q5_K_M5.68 bpw23.07 GB4.29 GB28.92 GB (121%)~6 t/sPARTIAL
Q4_K_M4.8 bpw19.5 GB4.29 GB25.22 GB (105%)~7 t/sPARTIAL
FP44.25 bpw17.23 GB4.29 GB22.87 GB (95%)~33 t/sFITS
IQ3_XS3.3 bpw13.32 GB4.29 GB18.83 GB (78%)~42 t/sFITS

All Open-Weights Models Tested on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 (24GB GDDR6X) (Q4_K_M @ 32K Context)

Standard Q4_K_M precision with 32K context window and Q8_0 KV cache

27 Models Benchmarked
ModelArchitectureTotal VRAM NeededHeadroomEst. Decode SpeedCompatibilityDetailed Config
Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B Instruct
Alibaba Cloud
32.5B Dense25.22 GB(105%)-1.22 GB~7 tok/s! PARTIALConfigure CLI →
DeepSeek-R1 (671B MoE)
DeepSeek
671B MoE427.26 GB(999%)-403.26 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
DeepSeek-V3 (671B MoE)
DeepSeek
671B MoE427.26 GB(999%)-403.26 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
Meta Llama 3.3 70B Instruct
Meta AI
70.6B Dense49.96 GB(208%)-25.96 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Qwen 32B
DeepSeek
32.8B Dense25.41 GB(106%)-1.41 GB~6 tok/s! PARTIALConfigure CLI →
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Qwen 14B
DeepSeek
14.8B Dense13.16 GB(55%)+10.84 GB~63 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct
Alibaba Cloud
72.7B Dense51.27 GB(214%)-27.27 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
Meta AI
8B Dense7.87 GB(33%)+16.13 GB~114 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
Microsoft Phi-4 14B
Microsoft
14.7B Dense13.24 GB(55%)+10.76 GB~63 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
DeepSeek Coder V2 236B MoE
DeepSeek
236B MoE147.91 GB(616%)-123.91 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
Mistral Large 2 (123B Instruct)
Mistral AI
123B Dense83.04 GB(346%)-59.04 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
Meta Llama 3.1 405B Instruct
Meta AI
405B Dense260.72 GB(999%)-236.72 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
Google Gemma 2 27B Instruct
Google
27.2B Dense19.18 GB(80%)+4.82 GB~36 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
Google Gemma 2 9B Instruct
Google
9.2B Dense7.87 GB(33%)+16.13 GB~104 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
Qwen 3.8 27B Instruct
Alibaba Cloud
27.2B Dense21.93 GB(91%)+2.07 GB~35 tok/s• TIGHT FITConfigure CLI →
Qwen 3.8 235B-A22B MoE
Alibaba Cloud
235B MoE149.84 GB(624%)-125.84 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B MoE
Alibaba Cloud
35B MoE24.1 GB(100%)-0.1 GB~61 tok/s! PARTIALConfigure CLI →
DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (552B Engram MoE)
DeepSeek
552B MoE343.85 GB(999%)-319.85 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
Meta Muse Spark Open (816B-A42B MoE)
Meta AI
816B MoE512.86 GB(999%)-488.86 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
Google Gemma 4 26B MoE
Google
26.4B MoE20.23 GB(84%)+3.77 GB~185 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
Google Gemma 4 E4B (Edge 4B)
Google
4.1B Dense4.24 GB(18%)+19.76 GB~226 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE)
Meta AI
109B MoE71.66 GB(299%)-47.66 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
Microsoft Phi-4 Mini 3.8B
Microsoft
3.8B Dense3.92 GB(16%)+20.08 GB~245 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
Mistral Small 3 24B Instruct
Mistral AI
24B Dense18.33 GB(76%)+5.67 GB~40 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Llama 70B
DeepSeek
70.6B Dense49.96 GB(208%)-25.96 GB0 (OOM)✕ OOMConfigure CLI →
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Qwen 7B
DeepSeek
7.6B Dense6.41 GB(27%)+17.59 GB~127 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →
Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B Instruct
Alibaba Cloud
7.6B Dense6.41 GB(27%)+17.59 GB~127 tok/s✓ FITSConfigure CLI →