NVIDIA RTX 3090 vs NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB for local LLMs
228 reports on the NVIDIA RTX 3090 and 12 on the NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active at 4-bit, the NVIDIA RTX 3090 has 101.7 generation tokens/s (one run); the NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB has 9.7 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 2.7x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 3090 (936 GB/s on the NVIDIA RTX 3090, 346 on the NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB). Across 2 shared models with generation measurements on both cards, the NVIDIA RTX 3090's median is higher on 2 and the NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB's on 0.
- Memory
- 24GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 936 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 142 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 228
- Memory
- 24GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 346 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 12 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 3090 | NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active4-bit | 101.7one runllama.cpp64K context | 9.7one runengine not statedcontext not stated |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active3-bit | 120.0one runllama.cpp256K context | 37.9one runPP 982.0 (one run)llama.cppcontext 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 3090 | NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 120.1 t/sQ4_K_S | 44.4 t/sQ4_K_S |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M | 12.5 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | 19.4 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM | 16.9 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 27B | 33.9 t/sQ4_K_M | 12.5 t/sQ4_K_M |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 76.4 t/sQ5_K_S | 28.2 t/sQ5_K_S |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 552B · 16B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA RTX 3090 · NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB
Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA RTX 3090 · NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB