NVIDIA

RTX 3060 12GB

Practical deployment guidance for this machine, using conservative fit estimates instead of marketing-style claims.

Memory
12 GB VRAM
System RAM
32 GB
Bandwidth
360 GB/s
Preferred backend
Ollama

Hardware notes

  • Good entry point for 7B and 8B local inference.
  • 14B can work with Q4 and short context, but headroom is limited.

Comfortable fits

Llama 3.1 8B Instruct

comfortable

Q4 at 8k context is estimated at 6.69 GB total and 38-65 tok/s.

Borderline fits

Phi-4

barely

This is a tight fit. Expect CPU offload or memory pressure of roughly 0.12 GB, and consider a lighter quant or shorter context.

Qwen2.5 Coder 14B Instruct

barely

This is a tight fit. Expect CPU offload or memory pressure of roughly 0.53 GB, and consider a lighter quant or shorter context.

Backend support

These are the runtimes currently associated with this hardware profile.

Ollamallama.cppLM StudioExLlama

Use the live calculator

The calculator lets you change context length, runtime, quantization, and concurrency instead of relying on a fixed profile.

Open calculator