NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB vs NVIDIA RTX 5060 8GB for local LLMs
46 reports on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB and 3 on the NVIDIA RTX 5060 8GB
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 24% higher on the NVIDIA RTX 5060 8GB (360 GB/s on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB, 448 on the NVIDIA RTX 5060 8GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
- Memory
- 12GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 360 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 51 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 46
- Memory
- 8GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 448 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 76 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 3
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 RTX 3060 12GB | NVIDIA RTX 5060 8GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU | 1.8 t/sQ6_K, layers on CPU |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B 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 | 16.1 t/sQ5_K_M, experts in RAM |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU | 1.8 t/sQ6_K, layers on CPU |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 58.8 t/sQ2_K | 10.2 t/sQ6_K, experts in RAM |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · NVIDIA RTX 5060 8GB
Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · NVIDIA RTX 5060 8GB