NVIDIA A100 80GB vs NVIDIA A40 48GB for local LLMs
3 reports on the NVIDIA A100 80GB and 8 on the NVIDIA A40 48GB
Which is faster for local LLMs?
Nobody has reported the same model at the same quant on both cards yet, so there's no measured head-to-head. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 2.9x higher on the NVIDIA A100 80GB (2,039 GB/s on the NVIDIA A100 80GB, 696 on the NVIDIA A40 48GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
NVIDIA A100 80GB
- Memory
- 80GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 2,039 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 312 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 3
NVIDIA A40 48GB
- Memory
- 48GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 696 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 150 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 8
Estimated by the calculator
The quant the calculator recommends for each card and its estimated speed at a 32,768-token context with 32 GB of system RAM, from memory bandwidth and the model's shape.
| Model | NVIDIA A100 80GB | NVIDIA A40 48GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 20.8 t/sFP16 | 14.2 t/sQ8_0 |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 123.0 t/sQ4_K_S | 64.5 t/sQ2_K |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 149.5 t/sQ8_0 | 44.7 t/sQ8_0 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | 9.4 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 20.8 t/sFP16 | 14.2 t/sQ8_0 |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 53.4 t/sFP16 | 38.3 t/sQ8_0 |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA A100 80GB · NVIDIA A40 48GB
Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA A100 80GB · NVIDIA A40 48GB