Can RTX 3060 12GB run Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3?

NVIDIA · 12 GB GDDR6 · 360 GB/s bandwidth · Mistral · 7.2B · model ctx up to 32K

Yes — the RTX 3060 12GB (12 GB GDDR6) can run Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3. At Q4 with the default 8K context it needs ≈ 6.4 GB VRAM (weights 3.96 GB + KV cache 1.44 GB + 1 GB runtime overhead), which fits within 12 GB. Decode at Q4/8K: ≈ 31.8 tok/s (estimated, batch 1). FP16 needs ≈ 16.84 GB — does not fit on this card. Estimates come from memory-bandwidth math; rows tagged measured override estimates. Relative ranking is more reliable than absolute tok/s. Methodology.

Fit & speed by quant and context

Quant	Context	VRAM needed	Fits?	tok/s (decode)
Q4	4K	5.68 GB	Yes	31.8 est.
Q4	8K default	6.4 GB	Yes	31.8 est.
Q4	32K	10.72 GB	Yes	31.8 est.
FP16	4K	16.12 GB	No	13.9 est.
FP16	8K default	16.84 GB	No	12.7 est.
FP16	32K	21.16 GB	No	8.0 est.

Fits = weights + KV(ctx) + 1 GB overhead ≤ 95% of VRAM. Measured anchors are context-agnostic; the fit verdict is recomputed per context. A missing tok/s means the model is far beyond this card (offload-only territory).

VRAM breakdown at 8K context

Quant	Weights	KV cache	Overhead	Total needed	RTX 3060 12GB VRAM
Q4	3.96 GB	1.44 GB	1 GB	6.4 GB	12 GB
FP16	14.4 GB	1.44 GB	1 GB	16.84 GB	12 GB

Other GPUs that run Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3

• B200 192GB SXM — ≈707.1 tok/s Q4 est.
• MI300X 192GB — ≈468.4 tok/s Q4 est.
• H200 141GB SXM5 — ≈424.2 tok/s Q4 est.
• H100 80GB SXM5 — ≈296.1 tok/s Q4 est.
• Gaudi 3 128GB — ≈289.5 tok/s Q4 est.
• RTX 5090 32GB — ≈255.9 tok/s Q4 measured
• A100 80GB SXM4 — ≈180.2 tok/s Q4 est.
• RTX 6000 Ada 48GB — ≈166.6 tok/s Q4 measured

All GPUs for Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 →

Other models for the RTX 3060 12GB

• Qwen3-0.6B — ≈286.4 tok/s Q4 est.
• gemma-3-1b-it — ≈229.1 tok/s Q4 est.
• Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct — ≈190.9 tok/s Q4 est.
• Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct — ≈122.9 tok/s Q4 measured
• Qwen3-1.7B — ≈114.5 tok/s Q4 est.
• Phi-4-mini-instruct — ≈60.3 tok/s Q4 est.
• Phi-4-mini-reasoning — ≈60.3 tok/s Q4 est.
• gemma-3-4b-it — ≈58.7 tok/s Q4 est.

All models on the RTX 3060 12GB →