Calculate the TPS of the RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB on local AI models

NVIDIA 12 GB GDDR6 336 GB/s April 2021

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 · 102 tok/s

Fastest model

Gemma 3 QAT 1B

142 tok/s · 1B

Which AI models can run on a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB?

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
142 tok/s

121–171

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

121–171

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

85–228 · low confidence

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

85–228 · low confidence

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

85–228 · low confidence

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

85–228 · low confidence

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

79–211 · low confidence

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

78–207 · low confidence

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

78–207 · low confidence

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

78–207 · low confidence

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

78–207 · low confidence

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

71–190 · low confidence

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

71–190 · low confidence

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

71–190 · low confidence

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

71–190 · low confidence

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

98–139

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

68–183 · low confidence

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

68–183 · low confidence

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

66–175 · low confidence

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

66–175 · low confidence

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

66–175 · low confidence

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

66–175 · low confidence

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

66–175 · low confidence

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

66–175 · low confidence

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

66–175 · 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

RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB 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
336 GB/s
Memory type
GDDR6
Memory bus width
192 bit
Memory clock
1.75 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
GA104
Architecture
Ampere
Generation
Ampere-MW(Ax000)
Foundry
Samsung
Process size
8 nm
Transistors
17.4 billion
Transistor density
44,400 K/mm²
Die size
392 mm²
Package
BGA-2713
Released
12 April 2021

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
495 MHz
Boost clock
1.17 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
4,096
Texture mapping units
128
Render output units
64
Streaming multiprocessors
32
Tensor cores
128
Ray tracing cores
32
L1 cache
128 KB
L2 cache
4 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)
9.6 TFLOPS
Single precision (FP32)
9.6 TFLOPS
Double precision (FP64)
149.8 GFLOPS
Pixel rate
75 GPixel/s
Texture rate
150 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)
70 W
Power connectors
None
Bus interface
PCIe 4.0 x16

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 RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB

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

Why memory is the number that matters here

Memory

12 GB

Bandwidth

336 GB/s

Largest model

ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B

12 GB of GDDR6 puts the RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB 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 336 GB/s across a 192-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.

The figure is the memory clock — 1.75 GHz here — multiplied by the bus width. It is why core counts predict generation speed so poorly.

In practice that combination tops out at ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B — 21B, compressed to Q3_K_M, generating around 102 tokens per second.

The chip and how it was built

The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB is built on the GA104 graphics processor, using NVIDIA's Ampere architecture, as part of the Ampere-MW(Ax000) generation.

The chip is manufactured by Samsung, on a 8 nm process, with a die measuring 392 mm², holding 17.4 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 April 2021, 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

9.6 TFLOPS

FP64

149.8 GFLOPS

Tensor cores

128

On paper the RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB reaches 9.6 TFLOPS at half precision and 9.6 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 149.8 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 128 tensor cores across 32 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 495 MHz at base to 1.17 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 RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB has 128 KB of L1 cache, backed by 4 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 4,096 shading units, 128 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

70 W

The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB is rated at 70 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.

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 RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB

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 102 tok/s
  2. 02 GigaChat Lite (GigaChat-20B-A3B) 20B · Q3_K_M · Dec 2024 107 tok/s
  3. 03 InternLM2.5 20B · Q3_K_M · Aug 2024 19.2 tok/s
  4. 04 Granite 20B 20B · Q3_K_M · May 2024 19.2 tok/s
  5. 05 InternLM2-20B 20B · Q3_K_M · Jan 2024 19.2 tok/s
  6. 06 CogAgent 18B · IQ4_XS · Dec 2023 19.4 tok/s
  7. 07 SPHINX (Llama 2 13B) 19.9B · Q3_K_M · Nov 2023 19.3 tok/s
  8. 08 CogVLM-17B 17B · IQ4_XS · Nov 2023 20.6 tok/s
  9. 09 Flan UL2 19.5B · Q3_K_M · Mar 2023 19.7 tok/s
  10. 10 Palmyra Large 20B 20B · Q3_K_M · Mar 2023 19.2 tok/s

The fastest AI models on a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB

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 142 tok/s
  2. 02 Gemma 3 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 142 tok/s
  3. 03 LLama 3..2 Typhoon 2 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 142 tok/s
  4. 04 OLMo-1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 142 tok/s
  5. 05 HGRN 1B (WT 103) 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 142 tok/s
  6. 06 Pythia-1b 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 142 tok/s
  7. 07 OpenELM-1.1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 132 tok/s
  8. 08 TinyLlama-1.1B (1T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 129 tok/s
  9. 09 TinyLlama-1.1B (3T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 129 tok/s
  10. 10 DeciCoder-1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 129 tok/s

Step by step

How to work out the tokens per second of a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB

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

    Search for the model you want

    Every one of the 396 models this RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB runs is in the table above. Search narrows it by name or by size.

  2. 02

    Match the context to your work

    Drag the slider to the conversation length you plan to work at. The cache grows with the conversation, and on 12 GB it is often what pushes a large model over the edge.

  3. 03

    Choose how far you will compress

    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. 142 tok/s on Gemma 3 QAT 1B is the fastest result on this card, and like every row it carries a range that reflects how much the runtime matters.

  5. 05

    Check the headroom before you decide

    Compare what each model needs with the 12 GB this card provides. Tight means it works today; comfortable means it still works when the conversation grows.

  6. 06

    Cross-check against other hardware

    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 RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB compares.

Answers

RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB — common questions

01

Can a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB run a 13B model?

Yes. For example a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB runs DeepSeekMoE-16B at Q4_K_M, using about 10.0 GB of memory and generating around 114 tokens per second.

02

How much memory does a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB have?

A RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB has 12 GB of GDDR6 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.

03

What is the memory bandwidth of a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB?

The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB has 336 GB/s of memory bandwidth, across a 192-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.

04

What type of memory does a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB use?

It uses GDDR6 clocked at 1.75 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.

05

Who makes the RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB?

The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB is a NVIDIA product, with the chip manufactured by Samsung, on a 8 nm process.

06

When was the RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB released?

The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB was released in April 2021.

07

How much power does a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB use?

The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB has a rated board power of 70 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.

08

How much cache does a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB have?

The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB has 128 KB of L1 cache, and 4 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.

09

What are the TFLOPS of a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB?

The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB is rated at 9.6 TFLOPS at half precision and 9.6 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.

10

How many tensor cores does a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB have?

The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB has 128 tensor cores across 32 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.

11

Does the RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB support CUDA?

Yes. The RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB 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.

12

What bus interface does the RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB 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.

13

Is the RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB 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.

14

Can a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB 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.

15

Would two RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB cards be twice as fast?

Pairing RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB cards buys headroom rather than pace: 24 GB of combined memory, at roughly the same generation speed as one.

16

What AI models can a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB run?

396 of the 679 open-weight language models we track fit on a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB 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.

17

What is the largest AI model a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB can run?

The largest model in our catalogue that fits on a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB is ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B at 21B parameters, compressed to Q3_K_M. It generates roughly 102 tokens per second and needs about 10.1 GB of the card's memory.

18

How many tokens per second does a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB produce?

It depends on the model. On a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB the fastest model we track is Gemma 3 QAT 1B at about 142 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.

19

Can a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB run a 7B model?

Yes. For example a RTX A3000 Mobile 12 GB runs DeepSeek Coder 6.7B at Q6_K, using about 9.9 GB of memory and generating around 30.9 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.

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