NVIDIA A40 48GB vs NVIDIA DGX Spark for local LLMs
8 reports on the NVIDIA A40 48GB and 94 on the NVIDIA DGX Spark
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 2.5x higher on the NVIDIA A40 48GB (696 GB/s on the NVIDIA A40 48GB, 273 on the NVIDIA DGX Spark). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
NVIDIA A40 48GB
- Memory
- 48GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 696 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 150 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 8
NVIDIA DGX Spark
- Memory
- 128GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 273 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 125 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 94
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 A40 48GB | NVIDIA DGX Spark |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 14.2 t/sQ8_0 | 4.0 t/sFP16 |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 64.5 t/sQ2_K | 14.4 t/sQ6_K |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 44.7 t/sQ8_0 | 14.5 t/sFP16 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 38.3 t/sQ2_K |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 14.2 t/sQ8_0 | 4.0 t/sFP16 |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 38.3 t/sQ8_0 | 10.8 t/sFP16 |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA A40 48GB · NVIDIA DGX Spark
Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA A40 48GB · NVIDIA DGX Spark