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Can the RTX 3060 12GB Run Llama 3.3 70B?

Offload

Not entirely. Llama 3.3 70B at Q4_K_M is a 42.5 GB download (Hugging Face file listing for bartowski/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct-GGUF), about 30.5 GB more than the RTX 3060 12GB's 12 GB, so the remainder has to be offloaded to system RAM. Generation speed is then set by system-memory and PCIe bandwidth rather than by the GPU, so no tokens-per-second figure is quoted for this pair. The smallest card in this matrix that holds it entirely is the RTX A6000 48GB (48 GB).

Model file42.5 GBQ4_K_M
VRAM12 GBRTX 3060 12GB
Headroom30.5 GB shortafter weights
Median speed0 cited runs
Bandwidth ceiling~8 tok/s360 GB/s ÷ 42.5 GB

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Published runs for Llama 3.3 70B on the RTX 3060 12GB

No published run for this pair has passed the checks yet.

More about this pair

How much VRAM does Llama 3.3 70B need?

The Q4_K_M file is 42.5 GB. Add roughly 1.5 GB for the runtime and an ~8K-token context, so about 44 GB of VRAM holds it comfortably. Longer contexts grow the KV cache and need more.

What is the fastest Llama 3.3 70B can generate on the RTX 3060 12GB?

Generation reads every weight once per token, so the RTX 3060 12GB's 360 GB/s of memory bandwidth divided by the 42.5 GB file sets a ceiling near 8 tokens per second once the whole model is resident. Real runs land below it; SpecPicks rejects any published figure above it.

Check another pair

See the full matrix → · All RTX 3060 12GB benchmarks →

Llama 3.3 70B on other GPUs

Other models on the RTX 3060 12GB

How the checks work

The fit is the Q4_K_M file size against the card's VRAM, with 1.5 GB kept for the runtime and an ~8K context. A published run counts only if the pair fits, the run is Q4-class, its source does not call it an estimate, it is under the bandwidth ceiling above, and it is not one figure pasted across many cards. The whole matrix is downloadable as a CSV under CC BY 4.0.

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This page is editorial synthesis based on publicly available information. No independent first-party benchmarking is reported.