Calculate the TPS of the Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q on local AI models

NVIDIA 6 GB GDDR6 288 GB/s May 2019

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

280 models it can run

721 models in our catalogue altogether

Largest model it holds

Qwen-VL

9.6B · Q3_K_M · 34.3 tok/s

Fastest model

Gemma 3 QAT 1B

122 tok/s · 1B

Which AI models can run on a Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q?

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.

280 models match

Calculating
Quantisation Fit
122 tok/s

104–146

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

104–146

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

73–195 · low confidence

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

73–195 · low confidence

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

73–195 · low confidence

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

73–195 · low confidence

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

68–181 · low confidence

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

67–177 · low confidence

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

67–177 · low confidence

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

67–177 · low confidence

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

67–177 · low confidence

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

61–163 · low confidence

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

61–163 · low confidence

LFM2-1.2B 1.2B Jul 2025 2.0 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
102 tok/s

61–163 · low confidence

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

61–163 · low confidence

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

61–163 · low confidence

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

84–119

Llama 3.2 1B 1.2B Sep 2024 2.2 GB 113k tokens Q8_0 Comfortable
97.8 tok/s

59–156 · low confidence

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

56–150 · low confidence

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

56–150 · low confidence

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

56–150 · low confidence

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

56–150 · low confidence

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

56–150 · low confidence

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

56–150 · low confidence

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

56–150 · 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 RTX 3000 Max-Q 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
6 GB
Memory bandwidth
288 GB/s
Memory type
GDDR6
Memory bus width
192 bit
Memory clock
1.5 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
TU106
Architecture
Turing
Generation
Quadro Turing-M(Tx000)
Foundry
TSMC
Process size
12 nm
Transistors
10.8 billion
Transistor density
24,300 K/mm²
Die size
445 mm²
Package
BGA-2228
Released
27 May 2019

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
600 MHz
Boost clock
1.22 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
1,920
Texture mapping units
120
Render output units
64
Streaming multiprocessors
30
Tensor cores
240
Ray tracing cores
30
L1 cache
64 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.

Half precision (FP16)
9.3 TFLOPS
Single precision (FP32)
4.7 TFLOPS
Double precision (FP64)
145.8 GFLOPS
Pixel rate
78 GPixel/s
Texture rate
146 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)
60 W
Power connectors
None
Bus interface
PCIe 3.0 x16
Slot width
IGP

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
7.5
DirectX
12.2
OpenGL
4.6
Vulkan
1.4
OpenCL
3.0
Shader model
6.8

Listings

Where to buy a Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q

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

Memory: the specification that decides everything

Memory

6 GB

Bandwidth

288 GB/s

Largest model

Qwen-VL

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q carries only 6 GB of GDDR6. That limits it to the smaller end of the catalogue, and a model has to fit entirely inside before it generates anything at all. A runtime actually gets about 5.4 GB.

Memory bandwidth reaches 288 GB/s across a bus of 192 bits. Bandwidth is this card's real constraint. Every token requires reading the entire model out of memory, so a large model will feel slow here even when it fits.

That comes from a memory clock of 1.5 GHz. It is why core counts predict generation speed so poorly.

The practical ceiling is Qwen-VL, 9.6B, compressed to Q3_K_M and generating around 34.3 tokens per second.

The chip and how it was built

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q is built on the graphics processor TU106, using the architecture Turing from NVIDIA, as part of the generation Quadro Turing-M(Tx000).

The chip is manufactured by TSMC, on a process of 12 nm, with a die measuring 445 mm², holding 10.8 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 May 2019, roughly 7.3006388690162 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

FP16

9.3 TFLOPS

FP64

145.8 GFLOPS

Tensor cores

240

On paper Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q reaches 9.3 TFLOPS at half precision, and 4.7 TFLOPS at single precision. These are peak figures no real workload sustains, and generating text reaches only a small fraction of them — decoding is limited by memory rather than arithmetic, which is why a card can look enormously powerful here and still produce tokens at an ordinary rate.

Double-precision throughput reaches 145.8 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.

The card carries 240 tensor cores across 30 streaming multiprocessors. These accelerate the matrix arithmetic at the heart of a transformer, and they are what make prompt processing — reading a long document before answering — dramatically faster than it would otherwise be.

Clocks run from a base of 600 MHz to a boost of 1.22 GHz. 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

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q has an L1 cache of 64 KB, backed by an L2 cache of 3 MB. 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 1,920 shading units, 120 texture mapping units, and 64 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

60 W

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q is rated at 60 W. 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 igp. 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 RTX 3000 Max-Q

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 Qwen3.5-9B 9B · Q3_K_M · Feb 2026 36.6 tok/s
  2. 02 NVIDIA-Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 9B · Q3_K_M · Aug 2025 36.6 tok/s
  3. 03 Ovis2.5 9B 9B · Q3_K_M · Aug 2025 36.6 tok/s
  4. 04 GLM-4.1V-Thinking 9B · Q3_K_M · Aug 2025 36.6 tok/s
  5. 05 MamayLM 9B · Q3_K_M · Apr 2025 36.6 tok/s
  6. 06 GLM-4-9B-0414 9B · Q3_K_M · Apr 2025 36.6 tok/s
  7. 07 SimPO 9B · Q3_K_M · Nov 2024 36.6 tok/s
  8. 08 GLM-4V-9B 9B · Q3_K_M · Jun 2024 36.6 tok/s
  9. 09 Persimmon-8B 9.3B · Q3_K_M · Sep 2023 35.4 tok/s
  10. 10 Qwen-VL 9.6B · Q3_K_M · Aug 2023 34.3 tok/s

The fastest AI models on a Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q

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 122 tok/s
  2. 02 Gemma 3 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 122 tok/s
  3. 03 LLama 3..2 Typhoon 2 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 122 tok/s
  4. 04 OLMo-1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 122 tok/s
  5. 05 HGRN 1B (WT 103) 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 122 tok/s
  6. 06 Pythia-1b 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 122 tok/s
  7. 07 OpenELM-1.1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 113 tok/s
  8. 08 TinyLlama-1.1B (1T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 111 tok/s
  9. 09 TinyLlama-1.1B (3T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 111 tok/s
  10. 10 DeciCoder-1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 111 tok/s

Step by step

How to work out the tokens per second of a Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q

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

    The table lists 280 models the card handles. The search box takes a name or a size such as 27b, which matches on parameter count.

  2. 02

    Set the context length you will actually use

    Drag the slider to the conversation length you plan to work at. The cache grows with the conversation, and against a card holding 6 GB that is frequently the difference between a model fitting and not.

  3. 03

    Pin the comparison to one quality level

    By default the table picks the least-compressed copy that fits. Setting a floor removes models that only qualify through heavy compression.

  4. 04

    Look at the range, not just the number

    The figures are calculated, not measured. The fastest result on this card is 122 tok/s on Gemma 3 QAT 1B. The same card and model vary by thirty to fifty per cent between inference runtimes.

  5. 05

    Read the fit verdict last

    The fit column separates models that just fit from those with room to spare — worth checking before settling on one, against an available 6 GB.

  6. 06

    Check the same model from the other side

    Every model name in the table links to its own page, which runs the same calculation across every card we hold. That is where you see whether the right buy is Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q.

Answers

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q — common questions

01

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— how many tokens per second does it produce?

It depends on the model. The fastest model we track here is Gemma 3 QAT 1B at about 122 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.

02

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— can it run 7B models?

Yes. For example it runs Gemma 4 E4B at Q3_K_M, using about 5.2 GB of memory and generating around 73.1 tokens per second.

03

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— how much memory does it have?

This card has 6 GB of GDDR6. Around a tenth is reserved by the inference runtime and the driver, leaving roughly 5.4 GB available for a model and its conversation.

04

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— what is its memory bandwidth?

Memory bandwidth reaches 288 GB/s across a bus of 192 bits. 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.

05

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— what type of memory does it use?

It uses GDDR6 clocked at 1.5 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.

06

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— who makes it?

This is a product of NVIDIA, with the chip manufactured by TSMC, on a process of 12 nm.

07

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— when was it released?

It was released in May 2019.

08

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— how much power does it use?

Rated board power is 60 W. Generating text draws hard in bursts and idles between requests, so average consumption over a working session is normally well below the rated figure.

09

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— how much cache does it have?

The L1 cache is 64 KB, and the L2 cache is 3 MB. 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.

10

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— what are its TFLOPS?

It is rated at 9.3 TFLOPS at half precision and 4.7 TFLOPS at single precision. These are peak arithmetic ceilings rather than achievable rates, and text generation reaches only a small fraction of them because it is limited by memory bandwidth instead.

11

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— how many tensor cores does it have?

It has 240 tensor cores across 30 streaming multiprocessors. They accelerate the matrix arithmetic a transformer is built from, which mainly speeds up processing a long prompt rather than producing the reply.

12

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— does it support CUDA?

Yes. It reports CUDA compute capability 7.5. 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.

13

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— what bus interface does it 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.

14

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— is it good for running local AI models?

Its memory limits it to smaller models though its bandwidth means generation will feel slow on larger models. In total it runs 280 of the models we track. Whether that is enough depends entirely on which model you want — the table above answers that directly.

15

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— can it run a model that does not fit in its memory?

Offloading past the card's 6 GB drags the whole thing down, and none of the figures on this page assume it.

16

Would two Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q cards be twice as fast?

No. A second card doubles the memory to 12 GB which lets you hold models neither could hold alone, but generation does not split that way. These figures describe one card.

17

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— which AI models can it run?

280 of the 721 open-weight language models we track fit on this card and can be run locally. The table on this page lists every one, with the memory it needs, the quantisation it runs at and an estimated generation speed.

18

Quadro RTX 3000 Max-Q— what is the largest AI model it can run?

The largest model in our catalogue that fits is Qwen-VL at 9.6B parameters, compressed to Q3_K_M. It generates roughly 34.3 tokens per second and needs about 5.4 GB of the card's memory.

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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