Calculate the TPS of the A40 PCIe on local AI models
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
679 models in our catalogue altogether
Largest model it holds
Qwen3-Coder-Next
80B · IQ4_XS · 50.3 tok/s
Fastest model
Gemma 3 QAT 1B
295 tok/s · 1B
Which AI models can run on a A40 PCIe?
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.
576 models match
Calculating| Quantisation | Fit | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
295
tok/s
250–354 |
Gemma 3 1B | 1B | Mar 2025 | 1.8 GB | 33k tokens | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
295
tok/s
250–354 |
Gemma 3 QAT 1B | 1B | Apr 2025 | 1.8 GB | 33k tokens | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
295
tok/s
177–472 · low confidence |
HGRN 1B (WT 103) ≈ | 1B | Nov 2023 | 1.8 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
295
tok/s
177–472 · low confidence |
LLama 3..2 Typhoon 2 1B ≈ | 1B | Dec 2024 | 1.8 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
295
tok/s
177–472 · low confidence |
OLMo-1B ≈ | 1B | Feb 2024 | 1.8 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
295
tok/s
177–472 · low confidence |
Pythia-1b ≈ | 1B | Apr 2023 | 1.8 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
273
tok/s
164–437 · low confidence |
OpenELM-1.1B ≈ | 1.1B | May 2024 | 1.9 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
268
tok/s
161–429 · low confidence |
DeciCoder-1B ≈ | 1.1B | Aug 2023 | 1.9 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
268
tok/s
161–429 · low confidence |
SantaCoder ≈ | 1.1B | Jan 2023 | 1.9 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
268
tok/s
161–429 · low confidence |
TinyLlama-1.1B (1T token checkpoint) ≈ | 1.1B | Oct 2023 | 1.9 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
268
tok/s
161–429 · low confidence |
TinyLlama-1.1B (3T token checkpoint) ≈ | 1.1B | Oct 2023 | 1.9 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
246
tok/s
147–393 · low confidence |
EXAONE 4.0 (1.2B) ≈ | 1.2B | Jul 2025 | 2.0 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
246
tok/s
147–393 · low confidence |
MinerU2.5 ≈ | 1.2B | Sep 2025 | 2.0 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
246
tok/s
147–393 · low confidence |
Pleias 1.0 1.2B ≈ | 1.2B | Dec 2024 | 2.0 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
246
tok/s
147–393 · low confidence |
Pleias-RAG-1B ≈ | 1.2B | Apr 2025 | 2.0 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
240
tok/s
204–288 |
Llama 3.2 1B | 1.2B | Sep 2024 | 2.2 GB | 131k tokens | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
236
tok/s
142–378 · low confidence |
MiniCPM-1.2B ≈ | 1.2B | Jun 2024 | 2.0 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
227
tok/s
136–363 · low confidence |
DeepSeek Coder 1.3B ≈ | 1.3B | Jan 2024 | 2.1 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
227
tok/s
136–363 · low confidence |
DeepSeek-VL-1.3B ≈ | 1.3B | Mar 2024 | 2.1 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
227
tok/s
136–363 · low confidence |
DigiRL ≈ | 1.3B | Jun 2024 | 2.1 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
227
tok/s
136–363 · low confidence |
GLA Transformer 1.3B ≈ | 1.3B | Aug 2024 | 2.1 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
227
tok/s
136–363 · low confidence |
Janus 1.3B ≈ | 1.3B | Oct 2024 | 2.1 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
227
tok/s
136–363 · low confidence |
Kosmos-2.5 ≈ | 1.3B | Aug 2024 | 2.1 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
227
tok/s
136–363 · low confidence |
Otter ≈ | 1.3B | May 2023 | 2.1 GB | 131k tokens ? | Q8_0 | Comfortable |
|
227
tok/s
136–363 · low confidence |
Phi-1 ≈ | 1.3B | Oct 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
A40 PCIe 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
- 48 GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 696 GB/s
- Memory type
- GDDR6
- Memory bus width
- 384 bit
- Memory clock
- 1.81 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
- GA102
- Architecture
- Ampere
- Generation
- Server Ampere(Axx)
- Foundry
- Samsung
- Process size
- 8 nm
- Transistors
- 28.3 billion
- Transistor density
- 45,100 K/mm²
- Die size
- 628 mm²
- Package
- BGA-3328
- Released
- 5 October 2020
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
- 1.31 GHz
- Boost clock
- 1.74 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
- 10,752
- Texture mapping units
- 336
- Render output units
- 112
- Streaming multiprocessors
- 84
- Tensor cores
- 336
- Ray tracing cores
- 84
- L1 cache
- 128 KB
- L2 cache
- 6 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)
- 37.4 TFLOPS
- Single precision (FP32)
- 37.4 TFLOPS
- Double precision (FP64)
- 584.6 GFLOPS
- Pixel rate
- 195 GPixel/s
- Texture rate
- 585 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)
- 300 W
- Suggested power supply
- 700 W
- Power connectors
- 8-pin EPS
- Bus interface
- PCIe 4.0 x16
- Slot width
- Dual-slot
- Dimensions
- 267 mm
- Display outputs
- 3x DisplayPort 1.4a
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
- 8.6
- DirectX
- 12.2
- OpenGL
- 4.6
- Vulkan
- 1.4
- OpenCL
- 3.0
- Shader model
- 6.8
Listings
Where to buy a A40 PCIe
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
Capacity and bandwidth
Memory
48 GB
Bandwidth
696 GB/s
Largest model
Qwen3-Coder-Next
The A40 PCIe carries 48 GB of GDDR6, which covers the mid-sized models most people actually run — about 43.2 GB of it after the runtime and driver reserve their working space.
The memory bus moves 696 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 1.81 GHz. Both halves matter, and neither is visible in a gaming benchmark.
The biggest thing it holds is Qwen3-Coder-Next (80B) at IQ4_XS compression, for about 50.3 tokens per second.
The chip and how it was built
The A40 PCIe is built on the GA102 graphics processor, using NVIDIA's Ampere architecture, as part of the Server Ampere(Axx) generation.
The chip is manufactured by Samsung, on a 8 nm process, with a die measuring 628 mm², holding 28.3 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 October 2020, roughly 5 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
37.4 TFLOPS
FP64
584.6 GFLOPS
Tensor cores
336
On paper the A40 PCIe reaches 37.4 TFLOPS at half precision and 37.4 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 is 584.6 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 336 tensor cores across 84 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 1.31 GHz at base to 1.74 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 A40 PCIe has 128 KB of L1 cache, backed by 6 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 10,752 shading units, 336 texture mapping units, and 112 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
300 W
The A40 PCIe is rated at 300 W, with a 700 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 8-pin EPS. 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 4.0 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 A40 PCIe
The biggest open-weight models that fit on this card, newest first. Each is shown at the best compression the card can hold.
The fastest AI models on a A40 PCIe
Where this card produces tokens quickest. Smaller models dominate here, because generating each token means reading the whole model out of memory once.
Step by step
How to work out the tokens per second of a A40 PCIe
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.
-
01
Search for the model you want
All 576 models the A40 PCIe handles are already listed. The search box takes a name or a size such as 27b, which matches on parameter count.
-
02
Set the context length you will actually use
Longer conversations cost memory on top of the weights. With 48 GB to work in, that is frequently the difference between a model fitting and not.
-
03
Choose how far you will compress
Each model is shown at the best compression this card can hold. A minimum quality hides the ones that only fit by being squeezed further than you would accept.
-
04
Read the speed and the range
Each speed is an estimate for a single conversation, with a range beneath it — 295 tok/s on Gemma 3 QAT 1B at the top end here. The same card and model vary by thirty to fifty per cent between inference runtimes.
-
05
Check the memory column before committing
The fit column separates models that just fit from those with room to spare — worth checking against the card's 48 GB before settling on one.
-
06
Open the model to compare cards
Following a model through to its own page lists all the hardware that can run it, so you can see where the A40 PCIe sits against the alternatives.
Answers
A40 PCIe — common questions
Can a A40 PCIe run a 13B model?
Yes. For example a A40 PCIe runs DeepSeekMoE-16B at Q8_0, using about 17.5 GB of memory and generating around 102 tokens per second.
Can a A40 PCIe run a 30B model?
Yes. For example a A40 PCIe runs ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B at Q8_0, using about 29.2 GB of memory and generating around 58.5 tokens per second.
Can a A40 PCIe run a 70B model?
Yes. For example a A40 PCIe runs Qwen3-Coder-Next at IQ4_XS, using about 38.8 GB of memory and generating around 50.3 tokens per second.
How much memory does a A40 PCIe have?
A A40 PCIe has 48 GB of GDDR6 memory. Around a tenth of that is reserved by the inference runtime and the driver, leaving roughly 43.2 GB available for a model and its conversation.
What is the memory bandwidth of a A40 PCIe?
The A40 PCIe has 696 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.
What type of memory does a A40 PCIe use?
It uses GDDR6 clocked at 1.81 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.
Who makes the A40 PCIe?
The A40 PCIe is a NVIDIA product, with the chip manufactured by Samsung, on a 8 nm process.
When was the A40 PCIe released?
The A40 PCIe was released in October 2020.
How much power does a A40 PCIe use?
The A40 PCIe has a rated board power of 300 W, and a 700 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.
How much cache does a A40 PCIe have?
The A40 PCIe has 128 KB of L1 cache, and 6 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.
What are the TFLOPS of a A40 PCIe?
The A40 PCIe is rated at 37.4 TFLOPS at half precision and 37.4 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.
How many tensor cores does a A40 PCIe have?
The A40 PCIe has 336 tensor cores across 84 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.
Does the A40 PCIe support CUDA?
Yes. The A40 PCIe reports CUDA compute capability 8.6. 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.
What bus interface does the A40 PCIe use?
It uses PCIe 4.0 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.
Is the A40 PCIe good for running local AI models?
Its memory is large enough for models most desktop hardware cannot touch and its bandwidth gives usable, if unspectacular, generation speeds. In total it runs 576 of the models we track. Whether that is enough depends entirely on which model you want — the table above answers that directly.
Can a A40 PCIe run a model that does not fit in its memory?
Only partly. Layers beyond the 48 GB sit in system memory and run at a fraction of the speed, so a mostly-offloaded model is rarely worth using. Every figure here assumes it is fully resident on the card.
Would two A40 PCIe cards be twice as fast?
Capacity adds, throughput does not. Two of them give you 96 GB to work with rather than twice the tokens per second — every figure here is for a single A40 PCIe.
What AI models can a A40 PCIe run?
576 of the 679 open-weight language models we track fit on a A40 PCIe 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.
What is the largest AI model a A40 PCIe can run?
The largest model in our catalogue that fits on a A40 PCIe is Qwen3-Coder-Next at 80B parameters, compressed to IQ4_XS. It generates roughly 50.3 tokens per second and needs about 38.8 GB of the card's memory.
How many tokens per second does a A40 PCIe produce?
It depends on the model. On a A40 PCIe the fastest model we track is Gemma 3 QAT 1B at about 295 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.
Can a A40 PCIe run a 7B model?
Yes. For example a A40 PCIe runs Multi-Token Prediction 7B at Q8_0, using about 7.9 GB of memory and generating around 44.0 tokens per second.
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.