NVIDIA DGX Spark vs NVIDIA RTX 3090 for local LLMs
71 reports on the NVIDIA DGX Spark and 182 on the NVIDIA RTX 3090
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active at 4-bit, the NVIDIA DGX Spark runs at 78.3 tokens per second (one run) and the NVIDIA RTX 3090 at 101.7 (one run). Those are community reports whose engines and settings differ, so the gap is a rough sign, not a controlled measure of the two cards. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 3.4x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 3090 (273 GB/s on the NVIDIA DGX Spark, 936 on the NVIDIA RTX 3090).
- Memory
- 128GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 273 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 125 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 71
- Memory
- 24GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 936 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 142 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 182
Measured on both
Median tokens per second from plain runs (one device, one request, no speculative decoding, the whole model in the device's memory) of the same model size at the same bit class. Each side shows the engines and reported context behind its median. Context can mean a configured window or prompt depth, so these are community comparisons with differing settings. How to read these
| Model | NVIDIA DGX Spark | NVIDIA RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active4-bit | 78.3one runvLLM128K context | 101.7one runllama.cpp64K context |
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. Where a model was also measured above, the measurement wins.
| Model | NVIDIA DGX Spark | NVIDIA RTX 3090 |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 14.5 t/sFP16 | 120.1 t/sQ4_K_S |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 4.0 t/sFP16 | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 14.4 t/sQ6_K | 19.4 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | 38.3 t/sQ2_K | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 4.0 t/sFP16 | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M |
| GLM-5.3 320B · 18B active | 12.7 t/sQ2_K | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 10.8 t/sFP16 | 76.4 t/sQ5_K_S |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA DGX Spark · NVIDIA RTX 3090
Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA DGX Spark · NVIDIA RTX 3090