NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super vs NVIDIA RTX 3060 Laptop
Which graphics card is better for running local language models? Here is how the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super (12 GB) compares against the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Laptop (6 GB) in real memory headroom, supported model architectures, and generation speed.
NVIDIA · Ada Lovelace
12 GB VRAM
NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super
- Memory Bandwidth: 504 GB/s (GDDR6X 192-bit)
- Fits fully in VRAM: 30 popular models
- Power Draw (TDP): 220W
- Largest recommended (Q4): 14B
NVIDIA · Mobile
6 GB VRAM
NVIDIA RTX 3060 Laptop
- Memory Bandwidth: 192 GB/s (GDDR6)
- Fits fully in VRAM: 22 popular models
- Power Draw (TDP): 150W
- Largest recommended (Q4): <4B
The AI Local Check Verdict: Which GPU should you buy for AI?
The NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super is the clear winner for local AI. It provides both 6 GB more VRAM and higher memory bandwidth (504 GB/s vs 192 GB/s).
This allows it to run larger model architectures entirely in video memory while also delivering faster token generation speeds on models of all sizes.
Models that fit on NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super, but NOT on NVIDIA RTX 3060 Laptop
These models run entirely in GPU VRAM on the NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super, but require slow system RAM offload on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 Laptop:
| Model | Size | Downloads | NVIDIA RTX 4070 Super | NVIDIA RTX 3060 Laptop |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| unsloth/Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct-GGUF | 30.53B | 12,866,779 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| unsloth/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF | 20.91B | 544,532 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| bartowski/DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite-Instruct-GGUF | 15.71B | 455,099 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| unsloth/Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B-GGUF | 34.66B | 435,428 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| Qwen/Qwen3-8B-GGUF | 8.19B | 405,506 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| bartowski/Kwaipilot_KAT-Coder-V2.5-Dev-GGUF | 34.66B | 397,259 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| MaziyarPanahi/Qwen3-14B-GGUF | 14.77B | 264,741 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
| MaziyarPanahi/Qwen3-30B-A3B-GGUF | 30.53B | 259,143 | Fits in VRAM | Offload (Slow) |
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