Can RTX 3070 8GB run Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct?

NVIDIA · 8 GB GDDR6 · 448 GB/s bandwidth · Meta · 70.6B · model ctx up to 128K

No — Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct at Q4 needs ≈ 46.83 GB even at 4K context, beyond the RTX 3070 8GB's 8 GB GDDR6. It would only run with heavy CPU/disk offload. FP16 needs ≈ 156.2 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	46.83 GB	No	—
Q4	8K default	53.83 GB	No	—
Q4	32K	95.83 GB	No	—
FP16	4K	149.2 GB	No	—
FP16	8K default	156.2 GB	No	—
FP16	32K	198.2 GB	No	—

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 3070 8GB VRAM
Q4	38.83 GB	14.0 GB	1 GB	53.83 GB	8 GB
FP16	141.2 GB	14.0 GB	1 GB	156.2 GB	8 GB

Other GPUs that run Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct

• B200 192GB SXM — ≈520.0 tok/s Q4 measured
• MI300X 192GB — ≈48.2 tok/s Q4 est.
• H200 141GB SXM5 — ≈43.6 tok/s Q4 est.
• H100 80GB SXM5 — ≈30.5 tok/s Q4 est.
• Gaudi 3 128GB — ≈29.8 tok/s Q4 est.
• A100 80GB SXM4 — ≈18.5 tok/s Q4 est.
• Mac Studio M2 Ultra 192GB — ≈8.0 tok/s Q4 measured
• Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB — ≈7.4 tok/s Q4 est.

All GPUs for Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct →

Other models for the RTX 3070 8GB

• Qwen3-0.6B — ≈356.4 tok/s Q4 est.
• gemma-3-1b-it — ≈285.1 tok/s Q4 est.
• Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct — ≈237.6 tok/s Q4 est.
• Qwen3-1.7B — ≈142.5 tok/s Q4 est.
• Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct — ≈89.1 tok/s Q4 est.
• Phi-4-mini-instruct — ≈75.0 tok/s Q4 est.
• Phi-4-mini-reasoning — ≈75.0 tok/s Q4 est.
• gemma-3-4b-it — ≈73.1 tok/s Q4 est.

All models on the RTX 3070 8GB →