Qwen on NVIDIA Ampere

Can I run Qwen2.5 72B on an RTX 3060 12GB?

Not at Q4_K_M — it needs 44.6 GB against 10.5 GB available. You would need 5 of these cards.

Won't fit

44.6 GB of 10.5 GB · 426%
046 GB
Weights 41.2 GB
KV cache 2.5 GB
Runtime overhead 0.9 GB
Over the limit 34.2 GB

Short by 34.2 GB. You can run it with 13 of 80 layers on the RTX 3060 12GB and the rest in system RAM, at roughly 1.08 tok/s — usable for batch work, painful for chat. A smaller quantisation or a shorter context is usually the better trade.

Generation1.08tok/s
Prompt processing72.2tok/s
Max context0tokens
KV per 1K tokens0GB

Every quantisation of Qwen2.5 72B on a RTX 3060 12GB

Highlighted row is the highest quality that still fits at 8K context.

QuantisationbpwWeights TotalVerdictMax ctxtok/s
FP16 / BF16 16.00 135.4 GB 138.8 GB Won't fit — 0.30
INT8 / W8A8 8.50 71.4 GB 74.8 GB Won't fit — 0.59
Q8_0 (GGUF) 8.50 71.4 GB 74.8 GB Won't fit — 0.59
FP8 (E4M3) 8.00 67.7 GB 71.1 GB Won't fit — 0.63
Q6_K 6.56 55.5 GB 58.9 GB Won't fit — 0.78
Q5_K_M 5.67 48.0 GB 51.4 GB Won't fit — 0.91
Q5_K_S 5.52 46.7 GB 50.1 GB Won't fit — 0.95
Q4_K_M 4.85 41.2 GB 44.6 GB Won't fit — 1.08
AWQ 4-bit 4.25 39.4 GB 42.8 GB Won't fit — 1.15
GPTQ 4-bit 4.25 39.4 GB 42.8 GB Won't fit — 1.15
MXFP4 4.25 39.4 GB 42.8 GB Won't fit — 1.15
Q4_K_S 4.58 39.0 GB 42.4 GB Won't fit — 1.16
Q4_0 4.55 38.8 GB 42.2 GB Won't fit — 1.17
IQ4_XS 4.25 36.3 GB 39.7 GB Won't fit — 1.26
Q3_K_M 3.91 33.6 GB 36.9 GB Won't fit — 1.37
IQ3_M 3.70 31.8 GB 35.2 GB Won't fit — 1.46
IQ3_XXS 3.06 26.6 GB 30.0 GB Won't fit — 1.83
Q2_K 2.63 23.1 GB 26.5 GB Won't fit — 2.18
IQ2_XXS 2.06 18.4 GB 21.8 GB Won't fit — 2.93
IQ1_M 1.75 15.9 GB 19.3 GB Won't fit — 3.63

Also worth checking

Qwen2.5 72B on every GPU
Full hardware tableEverything that runs on a RTX 3060 12GB
Full model tableWhy the KV cache is the part that bites
Guide