Can RTX 4070 12GB run DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B?

NVIDIA · 12 GB GDDR6X · 504 GB/s bandwidth · DeepSeek · 70.6B · model ctx up to 128K

No — DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B at Q4 needs ≈ 46.89 GB even at 4K context, beyond the RTX 4070 12GB's 12 GB GDDR6X. It would only run with heavy CPU/disk offload. FP16 needs ≈ 156.32 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	46.89 GB	No	0.9 est.
Q4	8K default	53.95 GB	No	—
Q4	32K	96.31 GB	No	—
FP16	4K	149.26 GB	No	—
FP16	8K default	156.32 GB	No	—
FP16	32K	198.68 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 4070 12GB VRAM
Q4	38.83 GB	14.12 GB	1 GB	53.95 GB	12 GB
FP16	141.2 GB	14.12 GB	1 GB	156.32 GB	12 GB

Other GPUs that run DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B

• B200 192GB SXM — ≈72.1 tok/s Q4 est.
• MI300X 192GB — ≈47.8 tok/s Q4 est.
• H200 141GB SXM5 — ≈43.3 tok/s Q4 est.
• H100 80GB SXM5 — ≈30.2 tok/s Q4 est.
• Gaudi 3 128GB — ≈29.5 tok/s Q4 est.
• A100 80GB SXM4 — ≈18.4 tok/s Q4 est.
• Mac Studio M3 Ultra 96GB — ≈7.4 tok/s Q4 est.
• Mac Studio M2 Ultra 192GB — ≈7.2 tok/s Q4 est.

All GPUs for DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B →

Other models for the RTX 4070 12GB

• Qwen3-0.6B — ≈400.9 tok/s Q4 est.
• gemma-3-1b-it — ≈320.7 tok/s Q4 est.
• Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct — ≈267.3 tok/s Q4 est.
• Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct — ≈160.7 tok/s Q4 measured
• Qwen3-1.7B — ≈160.4 tok/s Q4 est.
• Phi-4-mini-instruct — ≈84.4 tok/s Q4 est.
• Phi-4-mini-reasoning — ≈84.4 tok/s Q4 est.
• gemma-3-4b-it — ≈82.2 tok/s Q4 est.

All models on the RTX 4070 12GB →