Calculate the TPS of the Quadro M6000 on local AI models

NVIDIA 12 GB GDDR5 317 GB/s March 2015

Every model in our catalogue assessed against this card at the context length and minimum quality you choose. Speed is an estimate for a single request, calculated from this card's memory bandwidth and the size of each model once compressed.

Calculated for this card

396 models it can run

679 models in our catalogue altogether

Largest model it holds

ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B

21B · Q3_K_M · 81.6 tok/s

Fastest model

Gemma 3 QAT 1B

114 tok/s · 1B

Which AI models can run on a Quadro M6000?

Set the inputs, read the answer

More context means more memory for the conversation cache. Speed is for a fresh conversation and does not change with this setting.

Hides models that would only fit by being compressed below this point.

396 models match

Calculating
Quantisation Fit
114 tok/s

40–229 · low confidence

Gemma 3 1B 1B Mar 2025 1.8 GB 33k tokens Q8_0 Comfortable
114 tok/s

40–229 · low confidence

Gemma 3 QAT 1B 1B Apr 2025 1.8 GB 33k tokens Q8_0 Comfortable
114 tok/s

40–229 · low confidence

HGRN 1B (WT 103) 1B Nov 2023 1.8 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
114 tok/s

40–229 · low confidence

LLama 3..2 Typhoon 2 1B 1B Dec 2024 1.8 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
114 tok/s

40–229 · low confidence

OLMo-1B 1B Feb 2024 1.8 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
114 tok/s

40–229 · low confidence

Pythia-1b 1B Apr 2023 1.8 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
106 tok/s

37–212 · low confidence

OpenELM-1.1B 1.1B May 2024 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
104 tok/s

36–208 · low confidence

DeciCoder-1B 1.1B Aug 2023 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
104 tok/s

36–208 · low confidence

SantaCoder 1.1B Jan 2023 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
104 tok/s

36–208 · low confidence

TinyLlama-1.1B (1T token checkpoint) 1.1B Oct 2023 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
104 tok/s

36–208 · low confidence

TinyLlama-1.1B (3T token checkpoint) 1.1B Oct 2023 1.9 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
95.2 tok/s

33–190 · low confidence

EXAONE 4.0 (1.2B) 1.2B Jul 2025 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
95.2 tok/s

33–190 · low confidence

MinerU2.5 1.2B Sep 2025 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
95.2 tok/s

33–190 · low confidence

Pleias 1.0 1.2B 1.2B Dec 2024 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
95.2 tok/s

33–190 · low confidence

Pleias-RAG-1B 1.2B Apr 2025 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
92.9 tok/s

33–186 · low confidence

Llama 3.2 1B 1.2B Sep 2024 2.2 GB 131k tokens Q8_0 Comfortable
91.6 tok/s

32–183 · low confidence

DeepSeekMoE-16B 16B Jan 2024 10.0 GB 4k tokens Q4_K_M Tight
91.6 tok/s

32–183 · low confidence

MiniCPM-1.2B 1.2B Jun 2024 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
87.9 tok/s

31–176 · low confidence

DeepSeek Coder 1.3B 1.3B Jan 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
87.9 tok/s

31–176 · low confidence

DeepSeek-VL-1.3B 1.3B Mar 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
87.9 tok/s

31–176 · low confidence

DigiRL 1.3B Jun 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
87.9 tok/s

31–176 · low confidence

GLA Transformer 1.3B 1.3B Aug 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
87.9 tok/s

31–176 · low confidence

Janus 1.3B 1.3B Oct 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
87.9 tok/s

31–176 · low confidence

Kosmos-2.5 1.3B Aug 2024 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
87.9 tok/s

31–176 · low confidence

Otter 1.3B May 2023 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable

Speeds are estimates for a single request — one conversation at a time — calculated from memory bandwidth, model size and quantisation. Real throughput varies with the inference runtime and its version. Figures published by hardware vendors measure many simultaneous requests and are much higher.

On record

Quadro M6000 full specification

Everything on record for this board, ordered by how much it bears on running a language model rather than by how a spec sheet would list it. Memory comes first because it decides the outcome; the rest is context.

Memory

The two specifications that decide what this card can run and how quickly. Capacity sets which models fit; bandwidth sets how many tokens per second they produce once they do.

Memory size
12 GB
Memory bandwidth
317 GB/s
Memory type
GDDR5
Memory bus width
384 bit
Memory clock
1.65 GHz

The chip

Which processor is on the board and how it was manufactured. A smaller process size generally means more performance for the same power.

Graphics processor
GM200
Architecture
Maxwell 2.0
Generation
Quadro Maxwell(Mx000)
Foundry
TSMC
Process size
28 nm
Transistors
8 billion
Transistor density
13,300 K/mm²
Die size
601 mm²
Package
BGA-2152
Released
21 March 2015

Clock speeds

How fast the processor runs. Worth far less here than on a gaming benchmark: generating text is limited by memory bandwidth, so a higher clock barely moves the result.

Base clock
988 MHz
Boost clock
1.11 GHz

Processing units

What the chip contains. These drive graphics performance and matter mainly for processing a long prompt rather than for producing the answer.

Shading units
3,072
Texture mapping units
192
Render output units
96
Streaming multiprocessors
24
L1 cache
48 KB
L2 cache
3 MB

Theoretical performance

Peak arithmetic rates published for the board. These are ceilings that no real workload reaches, and generating text reaches a small fraction of them because it is limited by memory rather than arithmetic.

Single precision (FP32)
6.8 TFLOPS
Double precision (FP64)
213.9 GFLOPS
Pixel rate
107 GPixel/s
Texture rate
214 GTexel/s

The board

What it takes to physically install and power the card — the practical constraints that decide whether it fits the machine you already own.

Power draw (TDP)
250 W
Suggested power supply
600 W
Power connectors
1x 8-pin
Bus interface
PCIe 3.0 x16
Slot width
Dual-slot
Dimensions
267 mm
Display outputs
1x DVI, 4x DisplayPort 1.2

Software support

Which graphics and compute interfaces the card supports. CUDA compute capability is the one that bears on inference: below 7.0 there are no tensor cores, and modern inference software falls back to slower code paths.

CUDA compute capability
5.2
DirectX
12.1
OpenGL
4.6
Vulkan
1.4
OpenCL
3.0
Shader model
6.8

Listings

Where to buy a Quadro M6000

No vendor is currently listing this card. Listings come from vendors who publish them here directly — browse the vendor directory to see who is selling what.

What the numbers mean

What the memory subsystem means for AI

Memory

12 GB

Bandwidth

317 GB/s

Largest model

ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B

12 GB of GDDR5 puts the Quadro M6000 comfortably into small and mid-sized models, with roughly 10.8 GB usable once the driver overhead is taken out. The largest models are out of reach without splitting them.

The memory bus moves 317 GB/s across a 384-bit bus. That is the number that governs generation speed — arithmetic per byte read is small enough that the bus, not the cores, is what everything waits on.

Bandwidth is clock times bus width, and this card clocks its memory at 1.65 GHz. Both halves matter, and neither is visible in a gaming benchmark.

The practical ceiling is ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B at 21B, held at Q3_K_M and running at roughly 81.6 tokens per second.

The chip and how it was built

The Quadro M6000 is built on the GM200 graphics processor, using NVIDIA's Maxwell 2.0 architecture, as part of the Quadro Maxwell(Mx000) generation.

The chip is manufactured by TSMC, on a 28 nm process, with a die measuring 601 mm², holding 8 billion transistors. A smaller process generally means more performance for the same power, though for language models it matters far less than the memory subsystem.

It was released in March 2015, roughly 11 years ago. Inference software support tends to follow hardware by a year or two, so a card of this age generally has mature, well-optimised code paths available to it.

Compute throughput, and why it matters less than it looks

FP64

213.9 GFLOPS

Double-precision throughput is 213.9 GFLOPS. It has no bearing on running a language model — no inference runtime uses it — but it separates datacentre parts from consumer ones, since the latter deliberately restrict it.

Clocks run from 988 MHz at base to 1.11 GHz boosted. Worth far less here than on a gaming benchmark: raising the clock speeds up the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is not what generation is waiting on.

Cache and processing units

The Quadro M6000 has 48 KB of L1 cache, backed by 3 MB of L2. Cache absorbs a share of the memory traffic that would otherwise hit the main bus, which is the one place on this page where a number other than bandwidth quietly affects generation speed — a large L2 lets more of the working set stay close to the cores.

There are 3,072 shading units, 192 texture mapping units, and 96 render output units. These drive graphics workloads and contribute to prompt processing, but they sit idle for much of the time a model spends generating a reply.

Power, size and installation

Power draw

250 W

The Quadro M6000 is rated at 250 W, with a 600 W power supply suggested for the whole system. Running a language model keeps a card busy in bursts rather than continuously — it draws hard while generating and idles between requests — so sustained draw over a working day is usually well below the rated figure.

The board occupies a dual-slot, measuring 267 mm long, and needs 1x 8-pin. Worth checking against the case and power supply already in the machine, since the largest cards need considerably more of both than a typical desktop provides.

It connects over PCIe 3.0 x16. The interface governs how quickly a model is loaded from disk into the card, not how fast it runs once there, so a narrower link costs a few seconds at startup and nothing thereafter.

The extremes

The largest AI models that run on a Quadro M6000

The biggest open-weight models that fit on this card, newest first. Each is shown at the best compression the card can hold.

  1. 01 ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B 21B · Q3_K_M · Jun 2025 81.6 tok/s
  2. 02 GigaChat Lite (GigaChat-20B-A3B) 20B · Q3_K_M · Dec 2024 85.7 tok/s
  3. 03 InternLM2.5 20B · Q3_K_M · Aug 2024 15.4 tok/s
  4. 04 Granite 20B 20B · Q3_K_M · May 2024 15.4 tok/s
  5. 05 InternLM2-20B 20B · Q3_K_M · Jan 2024 15.4 tok/s
  6. 06 CogAgent 18B · IQ4_XS · Dec 2023 15.6 tok/s
  7. 07 SPHINX (Llama 2 13B) 19.9B · Q3_K_M · Nov 2023 15.5 tok/s
  8. 08 CogVLM-17B 17B · IQ4_XS · Nov 2023 16.5 tok/s
  9. 09 Flan UL2 19.5B · Q3_K_M · Mar 2023 15.8 tok/s
  10. 10 Palmyra Large 20B 20B · Q3_K_M · Mar 2023 15.4 tok/s

The fastest AI models on a Quadro M6000

Where this card produces tokens quickest. Smaller models dominate here, because generating each token means reading the whole model out of memory once.

  1. 01 Gemma 3 QAT 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 114 tok/s
  2. 02 Gemma 3 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 114 tok/s
  3. 03 LLama 3..2 Typhoon 2 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 114 tok/s
  4. 04 OLMo-1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 114 tok/s
  5. 05 HGRN 1B (WT 103) 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 114 tok/s
  6. 06 Pythia-1b 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 114 tok/s
  7. 07 OpenELM-1.1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 106 tok/s
  8. 08 TinyLlama-1.1B (1T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 104 tok/s
  9. 09 TinyLlama-1.1B (3T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 104 tok/s
  10. 10 DeciCoder-1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 104 tok/s

Step by step

How to work out the tokens per second of a Quadro M6000

You do not have to calculate anything by hand — the gputps.com calculator on this page has already worked it out for every model this card can hold. Reading off the answer takes six steps.

  1. 01

    Find the model in the table

    Every one of the 396 models this Quadro M6000 runs is in the table above. Search narrows it by name or by size.

  2. 02

    Set the context length you will actually use

    Set the context to your real working length. Short questions cost almost nothing; a long document can consume a large share of the card's 12 GB.

  3. 03

    Pin the comparison to one quality level

    Compression is what lets bigger models fit. The quality control drops any model that needs more of it than you are willing to give.

  4. 04

    Look at the range, not just the number

    Speeds come with error bars for a reason. The best case here is 114 tok/s on Gemma 3 QAT 1B, and which inference software you use moves that by thirty to fifty per cent.

  5. 05

    Check the memory column before committing

    A tight fit runs but leaves no room to raise the context later; comfortable has headroom. The memory column shows what each model needs against the 12 GB available.

  6. 06

    Open the model to compare cards

    Each model page repeats this calculation for the whole catalogue. Worth a look before deciding: it shows what else runs the same model, and how the Quadro M6000 compares.

Answers

Quadro M6000 — common questions

01

What AI models can a Quadro M6000 run?

396 of the 679 open-weight language models we track fit on a Quadro M6000 and can be run locally on it. The table on this page lists every one, with the memory it needs, the quantisation it runs at and an estimated generation speed.

02

What is the largest AI model a Quadro M6000 can run?

The largest model in our catalogue that fits on a Quadro M6000 is ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B at 21B parameters, compressed to Q3_K_M. It generates roughly 81.6 tokens per second and needs about 10.1 GB of the card's memory.

03

How many tokens per second does a Quadro M6000 produce?

It depends on the model. On a Quadro M6000 the fastest model we track is Gemma 3 QAT 1B at about 114 tokens per second, while larger models run proportionally slower because each token requires reading the whole model out of memory once. Speeds are estimates for a single conversation at a time.

04

Can a Quadro M6000 run a 7B model?

Yes. For example a Quadro M6000 runs DeepSeek Coder 6.7B at Q6_K, using about 9.9 GB of memory and generating around 24.8 tokens per second.

05

Can a Quadro M6000 run a 13B model?

Yes. For example a Quadro M6000 runs DeepSeekMoE-16B at Q4_K_M, using about 10.0 GB of memory and generating around 91.6 tokens per second.

06

How much memory does a Quadro M6000 have?

A Quadro M6000 has 12 GB of GDDR5 memory. Around a tenth of that is reserved by the inference runtime and the driver, leaving roughly 10.8 GB available for a model and its conversation.

07

What is the memory bandwidth of a Quadro M6000?

The Quadro M6000 has 317 GB/s of memory bandwidth, across a 384-bit memory bus. This is the single best predictor of how fast it generates text, because producing each token means reading the entire model out of memory once.

08

What type of memory does a Quadro M6000 use?

It uses GDDR5 clocked at 1.65 GHz. HBM types are found on datacentre accelerators and carry far more bandwidth than the GDDR used on desktop cards, which is why they generate tokens considerably faster at the same capacity.

09

Who makes the Quadro M6000?

The Quadro M6000 is a NVIDIA product, with the chip manufactured by TSMC, on a 28 nm process.

10

When was the Quadro M6000 released?

The Quadro M6000 was released in March 2015.

11

How much power does a Quadro M6000 use?

The Quadro M6000 has a rated board power of 250 W, and a 600 W system power supply is suggested. Generating text draws hard in bursts and idles between requests, so average consumption over a working session is normally well below the rated figure.

12

How much cache does a Quadro M6000 have?

The Quadro M6000 has 48 KB of L1 cache, and 3 MB of L2 cache. Cache absorbs part of the memory traffic that would otherwise reach the main bus, so a larger L2 gives a modest lift to generation speed beyond what bandwidth alone predicts.

13

Does the Quadro M6000 support CUDA?

Yes. The Quadro M6000 reports CUDA compute capability 5.2, which predates tensor cores. Capability 7.0 and above has tensor cores, which modern inference software uses; below that it falls back to slower code paths for quantised models.

14

What bus interface does the Quadro M6000 use?

It uses PCIe 3.0 x16. This governs how fast a model is loaded onto the card rather than how fast it runs once loaded, so it costs a few seconds at startup and nothing during generation.

15

Is the Quadro M6000 good for running local AI models?

Its memory covers small and mid-sized models, though the largest are out of reach though its bandwidth means generation will feel slow on larger models. In total it runs 396 of the models we track. Whether that is enough depends entirely on which model you want — the table above answers that directly.

16

Can a Quadro M6000 run a model that does not fit in its memory?

It can be split, with the overflow held in system memory — but that part drags the whole thing down, and none of the 12 GB figures on this page assume it.

17

Would two Quadro M6000 cards be twice as fast?

Pairing Quadro M6000 cards buys headroom rather than pace: 24 GB of combined memory, at roughly the same generation speed as one.

The other direction

Looking at it from the other side?

This page starts from the hardware. If you already know which model you want and need to know what it takes to run it, start from the model instead.

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