GeForce RTX 3060 12GB vs GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB for local LLMs

The GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB has more usable memory (16 GB vs 12 GB), so it runs 38 more of our tracked models at Q4, up to Ling-Coder-lite. For speed, the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB has 1.25× the memory bandwidth (360 vs 288 GB/s), so expect it to generate tokens roughly that much faster on models both can hold. On our dated price snapshots the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB is $170 cheaper. All checks are at Q4_K_M with about 4k context. Speed figures are estimates.

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What each one can run

Only the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB runs: Ling-Coder-lite, Ring-lite-distill-preview, Ling-lite, Ling-lite-1.5-2507, Ling-lite-1.5, Ring-lite, Ring-mini-linear-2.0, Kimi-VL-A3B-Instruct, Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking, Kimi-VL-A3B-Thinking-2506, LLaDA2.1-mini, LLaDA2.0-mini, Ling-mini-2.0, Ring-mini-2.0, LLaDA2.2-mini, LLaDA2.0-mini-preview, Moonlight-16B-A3B-Instruct, Moonlight-16B-A3B, Instella-MoE-16B-A3B-Think, DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite-Instruct, kanana-1.5-15.7b-a3b-instruct, Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B, Apriel-Nemotron-15b-Thinker, Apriel-1.5-15b-Thinker, Apriel-1.6-15b-Thinker, Carbon-X (DNA), Qwen2.5-Coder-14B-Instruct, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B, Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct, Qwen2.5-14B, Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M, Qwen2.5-Coder-14B, Qwen3-14B, JanusCoder-14B, HyperCLOVAX-SEED-Think-14B, phi-4, Phi-4-reasoning, Phi-4-reasoning-plus.

Biggest at Q4: OLMo-2-1124-13B-Instruct on the GeForce RTX 3060 12GB, Ling-Coder-lite on the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. Memory decides what fits; it doesn't measure speed, which also depends on memory bandwidth and the runtime.

Estimated speed

Estimated decode tokens per second at Q4, from each card's memory bandwidth (how we estimate). MoE figures are upper bounds. Real speeds vary with the runtime, drivers and context length, and older cards (Pascal, Volta, Vega) may run below these estimates in some runtimes.

Model by model