Home › Best › best LLM for 12GB VRAM The best open LLMs you can run on 12 GB of VRAM Open LLMs that fit in 12 GB of VRAM at their default quant — the sweet spot for an RTX 3060 12 GB, 4070, or 6700 XT. Ranked by popularity/recognition within the set that fits, with the honest $0-local, rent-a-GPU, and your-own-API-key cost for each. We guarantee the fit; you judge which one you like best.
How this is ranked: Objective fit filter only (fills the gap between the 8 and 16 GB tiers). 'Best' means 'runs on a 12 GB card.' VRAM is engine-computed; ordering is by popularity/recognition (a real signal), not a quality ranking we'd have to invent.
1. Llama 3.1 8B Instruct — Meta, 8B · ~8.0 GB VRAM · $0.07/1M API · commercial OK2. Qwen2.5 7B Instruct — Alibaba, 7B · ~7.0 GB VRAM · $0.15/1M API · commercial OK3. Qwen3 0.6B — Qwen, 800M · ~3.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · commercial OK4. Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3 — Mistral AI, 7.2B · ~8.0 GB VRAM · $0.20/1M API · commercial OK5. Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct — Alibaba, 7B · ~7.0 GB VRAM · $0.16/1M API est. · commercial OK6. Qwen3 4B — Qwen, 4B · ~5.0 GB VRAM · $0.13/1M API est. · commercial OK7. Qwen2.5 3B Instruct — Qwen, 3.1B · ~4.0 GB VRAM · $0.12/1M API est. · non-commercial8. Gemma 2 9B Instruct — Google, 9B · ~9.0 GB VRAM · $0.06/1M API · commercial OK9. Llama 3.2 3B Instruct — Meta, 3B · ~5.0 GB VRAM · $0.19/1M API · commercial OK10. Qwen2.5 1.5B Instruct — Qwen, 1.5B · ~3.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · commercial OK11. gemma 3 270m — google, 300M · ~2.0 GB VRAM · $0.10/1M API est. · commercial OK12. Qwen3-8B — Alibaba, 8.2B · ~9.0 GB VRAM · $0.29/1M API · commercial OK13. Qwen3 1.7B — Qwen, 2B · ~5.0 GB VRAM · $0.12/1M API est. · commercial OK14. BGE-M3 — BAAI, 567M · ~3.0 GB VRAM · $0.10/1M API est. · commercial OK15. Qwen3 4B Instruct 2507 — Qwen, 4B · ~5.0 GB VRAM · $0.13/1M API est. · commercial OK16. Qwen2.5 0.5B Instruct — Qwen, 500M · ~2.0 GB VRAM · $0.10/1M API est. · commercial OK17. Qwen2 1.5B Instruct — Qwen, 1.5B · ~3.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · commercial OK18. Llama 3.2 1B Instruct — Meta, 1.2B · ~3.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API · commercial OK19. Llama 3.2 1B — meta-llama, 1.2B · ~3.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · commercial OK20. Qwen2.5 0.5B — Qwen, 500M · ~2.0 GB VRAM · $0.10/1M API est. · commercial OK21. Phi-3.5-mini Instruct — Microsoft, 3.8B · ~5.0 GB VRAM · $0.13/1M API est. · commercial OK22. Qwen2-VL 7B Instruct — Alibaba, 8B · ~7.0 GB VRAM · $0.16/1M API est. · commercial OK23. gemma 3 1b it — google, 1B · ~3.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · commercial OK24. TinyLlama 1.1B Chat v1.0 — TinyLlama, 1.1B · ~2.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · commercial OK25. Rio 3.0 Open Mini — prefeitura-rio, 4B · ~5.0 GB VRAM · $0.13/1M API est. · commercial OK26. gpt2 large — openai-community, 800M · ~2.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · commercial OK27. OpenELM 1 1B Instruct — apple, 1.1B · ~3.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · non-commercial28. DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite Instruct — DeepSeek, 15.7B · ~11 GB VRAM · $0.23/1M API est. · commercial OK29. Hermes 3 — Llama 3.1 8B — Nous Research, 8B · ~8.0 GB VRAM · $0.16/1M API est. · commercial OK30. PowerMoE 3b — ibm-research, 3.4B · ~4.0 GB VRAM · $0.13/1M API est. · commercial OK31. Meta Llama 3 8B Instruct — meta-llama, 8B · ~10 GB VRAM · $0.16/1M API est. · commercial OK32. Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2 — mistralai, 7.2B · ~8.0 GB VRAM · $0.16/1M API est. · commercial OK33. Llama 3.1 8B — meta-llama, 8B · ~10 GB VRAM · $0.16/1M API est. · commercial OK34. Meta Llama 3 8B — meta-llama, 8B · ~10 GB VRAM · $0.16/1M API est. · commercial OK35. Phi 4 mini instruct — microsoft, 3.8B · ~6.0 GB VRAM · $0.22/1M API · commercial OK36. Qwen2.5 1.5B — Qwen, 1.5B · ~3.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · commercial OK37. NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 4B BF16 — nvidia, 4B · ~6.0 GB VRAM · $0.13/1M API est. · non-commercial38. h2ovl mississippi 800m — h2oai, 800M · ~2.0 GB VRAM · $0.11/1M API est. · commercial OK39. h2ovl mississippi 2b — h2oai, 2.2B · ~4.0 GB VRAM · $0.12/1M API est. · commercial OK40. Nomic Embed Text v1.5 — Nomic AI, 137M · ~2.0 GB VRAM · $0.10/1M API est. · commercial OKShowing the top 40 of 304. See all →
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