Mistral on NVIDIA Ampere
Can I run Mistral Small 24B on an RTX 3060 12GB?
Not at Q4_K_M — it needs 15.5 GB against 10.5 GB available. You would need 2 of these cards.
Won't fit
15.5 GB of 10.5 GB · 148%016 GB
Weights
13.4 GB
KV cache
1.3 GB
Runtime overhead
0.8 GB
Over the limit
5.0 GB
Short by 5.0 GB. You can run it with 25 of 40 layers on the RTX 3060 12GB and the rest in system RAM, at roughly 5.85 tok/s — usable for batch work, painful for chat. A smaller quantisation or a shorter context is usually the better trade.
Generation5.85tok/s
Prompt processing223tok/s
Max context0tokens
KV per 1K tokens0GB
Every quantisation of Mistral Small 24B on a RTX 3060 12GB
Highlighted row is the highest quality that still fits at 8K context.
| Quantisation | bpw | Weights | Total | Verdict | Max ctx | tok/s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 / BF16 | 16.00 | 43.9 GB | 46.0 GB | Won't fit | — | 1.05 |
| INT8 / W8A8 | 8.50 | 23.0 GB | 25.1 GB | Won't fit | — | 2.37 |
| Q8_0 (GGUF) | 8.50 | 23.0 GB | 25.1 GB | Won't fit | — | 2.37 |
| FP8 (E4M3) | 8.00 | 22.0 GB | 24.0 GB | Won't fit | — | 2.56 |
| Q6_K | 6.56 | 18.0 GB | 20.1 GB | Won't fit | — | 3.40 |
| Q5_K_M | 5.67 | 15.6 GB | 17.6 GB | Won't fit | — | 4.34 |
| Q5_K_S | 5.52 | 15.1 GB | 17.2 GB | Won't fit | — | 4.62 |
| AWQ 4-bit | 4.25 | 13.5 GB | 15.6 GB | Won't fit | — | 5.58 |
| GPTQ 4-bit | 4.25 | 13.5 GB | 15.6 GB | Won't fit | — | 5.58 |
| MXFP4 | 4.25 | 13.5 GB | 15.6 GB | Won't fit | — | 5.58 |
| Q4_K_M | 4.85 | 13.4 GB | 15.5 GB | Won't fit | — | 5.85 |
| Q4_K_S | 4.58 | 12.7 GB | 14.8 GB | Won't fit | — | 6.43 |
| Q4_0 | 4.55 | 12.6 GB | 14.7 GB | Won't fit | — | 6.47 |
| IQ4_XS | 4.25 | 11.9 GB | 13.9 GB | Won't fit | — | 7.53 |
| Q3_K_M | 3.91 | 11.0 GB | 13.1 GB | Won't fit | — | 8.97 |
| IQ3_M | 3.70 | 10.4 GB | 12.5 GB | Won't fit | — | 10.5 |
| IQ3_XXS | 3.06 | 8.8 GB | 10.9 GB | Won't fit | 6K | 19.4 |
| Q2_K | 2.63 | 7.7 GB | 9.8 GB | Fits, but tight | 13K | 27.0 |
| IQ2_XXS | 2.06 | 6.2 GB | 8.3 GB | Runs comfortably | 22K | 32.8 |
| IQ1_M | 1.75 | 5.4 GB | 7.5 GB | Runs comfortably | 27K | 37.1 |