Calculate the TPS of the RTX A5000 Max-Q on local AI models

NVIDIA 16 GB GDDR6 384 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

432 models it can run

679 models in our catalogue altogether

Largest model it holds

Nemotron 3-Nano-30B-A3B

31.6B · Q3_K_M · 77.2 tok/s

Fastest model

Gemma 3 QAT 1B

163 tok/s · 1B

Which AI models can run on a RTX A5000 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.

432 models match

Calculating
Quantisation Fit
163 tok/s

138–195

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

138–195

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

98–260 · low confidence

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

98–260 · low confidence

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

98–260 · low confidence

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

98–260 · low confidence

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

90–241 · low confidence

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

89–237 · low confidence

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

89–237 · low confidence

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

89–237 · low confidence

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

89–237 · low confidence

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

81–217 · low confidence

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

81–217 · low confidence

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

81–217 · low confidence

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

81–217 · low confidence

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

112–159

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

78–209 · low confidence

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

75–200 · low confidence

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

75–200 · low confidence

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

75–200 · low confidence

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

75–200 · low confidence

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

75–200 · low confidence

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

75–200 · low confidence

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

75–200 · low confidence

Otter 1.3B May 2023 2.1 GB 131k tokens ? Q8_0 Comfortable
125 tok/s

75–200 · 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

RTX A5000 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
16 GB
Memory bandwidth
384 GB/s
Memory type
GDDR6
Memory bus width
256 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
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
720 MHz
Boost clock
1.35 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
6,144
Texture mapping units
192
Render output units
96
Streaming multiprocessors
48
Tensor cores
192
Ray tracing cores
48
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)
16.6 TFLOPS
Single precision (FP32)
16.6 TFLOPS
Double precision (FP64)
259.2 GFLOPS
Pixel rate
130 GPixel/s
Texture rate
259 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)
80 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 A5000 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

Why memory is the number that matters here

Memory

16 GB

Bandwidth

384 GB/s

Largest model

Nemotron 3-Nano-30B-A3B

16 GB of GDDR6 puts the RTX A5000 Max-Q comfortably into small and mid-sized models, with roughly 14.4 GB usable once the driver overhead is taken out. The largest models are out of reach without splitting them.

The memory bus moves 384 GB/s across a 256-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 1.5 GHz. Both halves matter, and neither is visible in a gaming benchmark.

Put together, the largest model that fits is Nemotron 3-Nano-30B-A3B at 31.6B, running Q3_K_M and producing around 77.2 tokens per second.

The chip and how it was built

The RTX A5000 Max-Q 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

16.6 TFLOPS

FP64

259.2 GFLOPS

Tensor cores

192

On paper the RTX A5000 Max-Q reaches 16.6 TFLOPS at half precision and 16.6 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 259.2 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 192 tensor cores across 48 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 720 MHz at base to 1.35 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 A5000 Max-Q 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 6,144 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

80 W

The RTX A5000 Max-Q is rated at 80 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 A5000 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 North Mini Code 30B · Q3_K_M · Jun 2026 81.3 tok/s
  2. 02 Qwen 3.6-27B 27B · Q3_K_M · Apr 2026 16.3 tok/s
  3. 03 Qwen3.5-27B 27B · Q3_K_M · Feb 2026 16.3 tok/s
  4. 04 Nemotron 3-Nano-30B-A3B 31.6B · Q3_K_M · Dec 2025 77.2 tok/s
  5. 05 Nomos 1 30B · Q3_K_M · Dec 2025 81.3 tok/s
  6. 06 C2S-Scale 27B · Q3_K_M · Oct 2025 16.3 tok/s
  7. 07 Gemma-SEA-LION-v4-27B-IT 27B · Q3_K_M · Aug 2025 16.3 tok/s
  8. 08 ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B 28B · Q3_K_M · Jun 2025 87.1 tok/s
  9. 09 Qwen3-30B-A3B 30B · Q3_K_M · Apr 2025 81.3 tok/s
  10. 10 Gemma 3 QAT 27B 27B · Q3_K_M · Apr 2025 16.3 tok/s

The fastest AI models on a RTX A5000 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 163 tok/s
  2. 02 Gemma 3 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 163 tok/s
  3. 03 LLama 3..2 Typhoon 2 1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 163 tok/s
  4. 04 OLMo-1B 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 163 tok/s
  5. 05 HGRN 1B (WT 103) 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 163 tok/s
  6. 06 Pythia-1b 1B · Q8_0 · 1.8 GB 163 tok/s
  7. 07 OpenELM-1.1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 151 tok/s
  8. 08 TinyLlama-1.1B (1T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 148 tok/s
  9. 09 TinyLlama-1.1B (3T token checkpoint) 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 148 tok/s
  10. 10 DeciCoder-1B 1.1B · Q8_0 · 1.9 GB 148 tok/s

Step by step

How to work out the tokens per second of a RTX A5000 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

    Every one of the 432 models this RTX A5000 Max-Q 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 16 GB.

  3. 03

    Choose how far you will compress

    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

    Take the range as the answer

    Each speed is an estimate for a single conversation, with a range beneath it — 163 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.

  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 16 GB available.

  6. 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 RTX A5000 Max-Q sits against the alternatives.

Answers

RTX A5000 Max-Q — common questions

01

What is the memory bandwidth of a RTX A5000 Max-Q?

The RTX A5000 Max-Q has 384 GB/s of memory bandwidth, across a 256-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.

02

What type of memory does a RTX A5000 Max-Q 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.

03

Who makes the RTX A5000 Max-Q?

The RTX A5000 Max-Q is a NVIDIA product, with the chip manufactured by Samsung, on a 8 nm process.

04

When was the RTX A5000 Max-Q released?

The RTX A5000 Max-Q was released in April 2021.

05

How much power does a RTX A5000 Max-Q use?

The RTX A5000 Max-Q has a rated board power of 80 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.

06

How much cache does a RTX A5000 Max-Q have?

The RTX A5000 Max-Q 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.

07

What are the TFLOPS of a RTX A5000 Max-Q?

The RTX A5000 Max-Q is rated at 16.6 TFLOPS at half precision and 16.6 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.

08

How many tensor cores does a RTX A5000 Max-Q have?

The RTX A5000 Max-Q has 192 tensor cores across 48 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.

09

Does the RTX A5000 Max-Q support CUDA?

Yes. The RTX A5000 Max-Q 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.

10

What bus interface does the RTX A5000 Max-Q 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.

11

Is the RTX A5000 Max-Q 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 432 of the models we track. Whether that is enough depends entirely on which model you want — the table above answers that directly.

12

Can a RTX A5000 Max-Q run a model that does not fit in its memory?

Offloading past the card's 16 GB is possible and usually a false economy: the system-memory portion is slow enough to dominate the result.

13

Would two RTX A5000 Max-Q cards be twice as fast?

No. A second RTX A5000 Max-Q doubles the memory to 32 GB, which lets you hold models neither could hold alone, but generation does not split that way. These figures describe one card.

14

What AI models can a RTX A5000 Max-Q run?

432 of the 679 open-weight language models we track fit on a RTX A5000 Max-Q 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.

15

What is the largest AI model a RTX A5000 Max-Q can run?

The largest model in our catalogue that fits on a RTX A5000 Max-Q is Nemotron 3-Nano-30B-A3B at 31.6B parameters, compressed to Q3_K_M. It generates roughly 77.2 tokens per second and needs about 14.4 GB of the card's memory.

16

How many tokens per second does a RTX A5000 Max-Q produce?

It depends on the model. On a RTX A5000 Max-Q the fastest model we track is Gemma 3 QAT 1B at about 163 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.

17

Can a RTX A5000 Max-Q run a 7B model?

Yes. For example a RTX A5000 Max-Q runs Multi-Token Prediction 7B at Q8_0, using about 7.9 GB of memory and generating around 24.3 tokens per second.

18

Can a RTX A5000 Max-Q run a 13B model?

Yes. For example a RTX A5000 Max-Q runs DeepSeekMoE-16B at Q6_K, using about 13.7 GB of memory and generating around 82.1 tokens per second.

19

Can a RTX A5000 Max-Q run a 30B model?

Yes. For example a RTX A5000 Max-Q runs ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B at Q3_K_M, using about 12.9 GB of memory and generating around 87.1 tokens per second.

20

How much memory does a RTX A5000 Max-Q have?

A RTX A5000 Max-Q has 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. Around a tenth of that is reserved by the inference runtime and the driver, leaving roughly 14.4 GB available for a model and its conversation.

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.

All GPUs