NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB vs NVIDIA RTX 4070 for local LLMs
65 reports on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB and 12 on the NVIDIA RTX 4070
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Gemma 4 8B at 4-bit, the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB has 45.0 generation tokens/s (one run); the NVIDIA RTX 4070 has 55.0 generation tokens/s (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 40% higher on the NVIDIA RTX 4070 (360 GB/s on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB, 504 on the NVIDIA RTX 4070).
- Memory
- 12GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 360 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 51 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 65
- Memory
- 12GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 504 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 116 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 12
Measured on both
Generation and prompt processing speeds 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 RTX 3060 12GB | NVIDIA RTX 4070 |
|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 8B4-bit | 45.0one runOllamacontext not stated | 55.0one runOllamacontext not stated |
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 RTX 3060 12GB | NVIDIA RTX 4070 |
|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 8B | 30.5 t/sQ6_K | 42.6 t/sQ6_K |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU | 1.7 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 | 13.1 t/sQ6_K, experts in RAM | 13.9 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 | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU | 1.7 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 58.8 t/sQ2_K | 82.3 t/sQ2_K |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · NVIDIA RTX 4070
Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · NVIDIA RTX 4070