Can the RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X run Phi-4?
No. Phi-4 needs about 10.3 GB at Q4_K_M (weights plus 1.8 GB runtime overhead), and the RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X has 8 GB, so it won't fit without offloading layers to system RAM, which is far slower.
Every quantization
Phi-4 (14B) on 8 GB
| Quant | Weights | Needs | Fit | Est. speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 8.5 GB | 10.3 GB | Too big | - |
| Q5_K_M | 10.5 GB | 12.3 GB | Too big | - |
| Q8_0 | 16 GB | 17.8 GB | Too big | - |
| FP16 | 28 GB | 29.8 GB | Too big | - |
Estimates. Needs = weights + 1.8 GB for KV cache and runtime at modest context. Speed is single-stream decode scaled from the RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X's 608.3 GB/s bandwidth (Estimated from memory bandwidth (llama.cpp decode)). Long contexts need more memory and run slower.
What to do instead
Two ways forward
Cheapest cards that run it
- NVIDIA Tesla P40 - 24 GB, ~$159
- NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB - 12 GB, ~$199
- Intel Arc A770 16GB - 16 GB, ~$229
- Intel Arc B580 - 12 GB, ~$249
Models that fit the RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X
- Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 - 7.2B, 4 GB at Q4
- Qwen3.5 4B - 4.7B, 3 GB at Q4
- Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 - 4B, 2 GB at Q4
- NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 4B - 4B, 2 GB at Q4
Compare
Same model, other hardware - and other models on this card
Phi-4 on other hardware
- RTX 5090~121 tok/s
- RTX 5090 D~121 tok/s
- RTX 6000D~106 tok/s
- RTX 4090~74 tok/s
- Radeon RX 7900 XTX~65 tok/s
- RTX 5080~65 tok/s
- RTX 3090~64 tok/s
- RTX 3080 Ti~62 tok/s
Also runs on the RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X
- Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2~87 tok/s
- Qwen3.5 4B~116 tok/s
- Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507~174 tok/s
- NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 4B~174 tok/s
- Phi-4 Mini~140 tok/s
Frequently asked
Quick answers
Can the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X run Phi-4?
No. Phi-4 needs about 10.3 GB at Q4_K_M (weights plus 1.8 GB runtime overhead), and the RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X has 8 GB, so it won't fit without offloading layers to system RAM, which is far slower.
How much VRAM does Phi-4 need?
About 8.5 GB of weights at Q4_K_M, 16 GB at Q8_0 and 28 GB at FP16. Add roughly 1.8 GB for the KV cache and runtime at modest context lengths.
How fast is Phi-4 on the RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X?
It doesn't fit in the RTX 3060 Ti GDDR6X's memory, so speed depends on how many layers you offload to system RAM - typically single-digit tokens per second or lower.