With 8 GB VRAM, assuming 16 GB system RAM for partial offload, these are the best open models that fit. The top pick is Qwen3 8B at Q4_K_M (~6.2 GB, ~52 tok/s): ollama run qwen3:8b.
Best for coding: Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B (qwen2.5-coder:7b-instruct-q5_K_M), Code Llama 7B (codellama:7b-instruct-q5_K_M), gpt-oss 20B (MoE, MXFP4) (gpt-oss:20b).
Runtimes available for this hardware: Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM.
Open the interactive checker for RTX 3060 Ti 8GB| # | Model | Quant | Memory needed | Fit | Speed | Command |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qwen3 8B | Q4_K_M | 6.2 GB | fits in fast memory | ~52 tok/s | ollama run qwen3:8b |
| 2 | DeepSeek R1 0528 Qwen3 8B | Q4_K_M | 6.2 GB | fits in fast memory | ~52 tok/s | ollama run deepseek-r1:8b |
| 3 | DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B | Q4_K_M | 5.7 GB | fits in fast memory | ~57 tok/s | ollama run deepseek-r1:7b |
| 4 | MiniCPM-V 2.6 8B | Q5_K_M | 7.5 GB | fits in fast memory | ~41 tok/s | ollama run minicpm-v:8b-2.6-q5_K_M |
| 5 | Qwen 2.5 VL 7B | Q4_K_M | 7 GB | fits in fast memory | ~45 tok/s | ollama run qwen2.5vl:7b |
| 6 | Qwen3 4B | Q8_0 | 5.2 GB | fits in fast memory | ~61 tok/s | ollama run qwen3:4b-q8_0 |
| 7 | Gemma 3 4B | Q8_0 | 5.8 GB | fits in fast memory | ~54 tok/s | ollama run gemma3:4b-it-q8_0 |
| 8 | tev1 4B (Together AI, decision) | Q8_0 | 5.4 GB | fits in fast memory | ~58 tok/s | ollama run tev1:4b-q8_0 |
| 9 | Phi-4 Mini 3.8B | Q8_0 | 4.9 GB | fits in fast memory | ~66 tok/s | ollama run phi4-mini:3.8b-q8_0 |
| 10 | Llama 3.2 3B | Q8_0 | 4.2 GB | fits in fast memory | ~79 tok/s | ollama run llama3.2:3b-instruct-q8_0 |
| 11 | Qwen3 1.7B | Q8_0 | 2.9 GB | fits in fast memory | ~122 tok/s | ollama run qwen3:1.7b-q8_0 |
| 12 | DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5B | Q8_0 | 2.6 GB | fits in fast memory | ~141 tok/s | ollama run deepseek-r1:1.5b-qwen-distill-q8_0 |
Estimates, not benchmarks. Model sizes are ollama.com download sizes; memory needed adds headroom for ~8k tokens of context; speeds are rough figures from memory bandwidth. Data updated 2026-10-14.
A project by OnDevice Labs · llms.txt