llamaperf

NVIDIA RTX 5090 vs NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB for local LLMs

175 reports on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 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 5090 has 215.1 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 5.2x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 5090 (1,792 GB/s on the NVIDIA RTX 5090, 346 on the NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB).

NVIDIA RTX 5090
Memory
32GB
Memory bandwidth
1,792 GB/s
FP16 compute
419 TFLOPS
Reports
175
NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB
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

ModelNVIDIA RTX 5090NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB
Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active4-bit215.1one runllama.cppcontext not stated9.7one runengine not statedcontext 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.

ModelNVIDIA RTX 5090NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB
Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active163.0 t/sQ5_K_M44.4 t/sQ4_K_S
Qwen3.8 27B44.9 t/sQ6_K12.5 t/sQ4_K_M
Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active20.3 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM16.9 t/sQ2_K, experts in RAM
DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings
Qwen3.6 27B44.9 t/sQ6_K12.5 t/sQ4_K_M
Gemma 4 26B · 4B active114.5 t/sQ6_K28.2 t/sQ5_K_S
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 552B · 16B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings

Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA RTX 5090 · NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB

Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA RTX 5090 · NVIDIA Tesla P40 24GB

More comparisons