M4 16GB vs NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB for local LLMs
26 reports on the M4 16GB and 68 on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB
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 3.0x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB (120 GB/s on the M4 16GB, 360 on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M4 16GB
- Memory
- 16GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 120 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 4.3 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 26
NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB
- Memory
- 12GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 360 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 51 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 68
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 | M4 16GB | NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 13.1 t/sQ6_K, experts in RAM |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 58.8 t/sQ2_K |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M4 16GB · NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M4 16GB · NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB