NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB vs NVIDIA RTX 5090 Laptop 24GB for local LLMs
46 reports on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB and 4 on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 Laptop 24GB
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 RTX 5090 Laptop 24GB (360 GB/s on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB, 896 on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 Laptop 24GB). 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
- 24GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 896 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 200 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 4
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 5090 Laptop 24GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU | 32.4 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 19.4 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM |
| 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 | 115.0 t/sQ4_K_S |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU | 32.4 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 58.8 t/sQ2_K | 73.2 t/sQ5_K_S |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · NVIDIA RTX 5090 Laptop 24GB
Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · NVIDIA RTX 5090 Laptop 24GB