NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB

If you’re curious about running LLMs at home but you’re not ready to spend real money, the RTX 3060 12GB is the floor. It’s the cheapest card that still does the job properly, and the one to point a first-timer at. Not fast, but properly capable, and cheap enough that a mistake doesn’t sting.

The take

This is an entry ticket, not a performance card. What makes it work is that oddly generous 12GB of VRAM; NVIDIA fitted more memory here than on some pricier Ampere cards, and for local AI that’s exactly the spec that counts. At roughly £230 used, it’s the least you can spend and still run models worth running. Slow-ish, cool, and cheap. That’s the deal.

What it’ll actually run

Twelve gigabytes lands you squarely in 7B to 14B territory, which covers a lot of real work. A 7B or 8B model at Q4 sits fully in VRAM with headroom for context, and a 14B at Q4 fits if you keep the context modest. That’s enough for chat, coding help, summarising, and most assistant tasks.

Speeds are where the budget shows. Expect something like 20 to 35 tokens/sec on a 7B at Q4, dropping toward 10 to 18 tokens/sec on a 14B. Fine for interactive use, less fun for long documents or heavy batch work. Quick enough to read along with, slow enough that you’ll notice on anything meaty. The 360 GB/s bandwidth is the ceiling, and it’s why bigger models with offload crawl; keep everything in VRAM and it stays pleasant.

On value, £230 for 12GB is around £19 per gigabyte, the best £/GB-VRAM figure of the three cards here. You’re paying less per gigabyte than a 3090, you’re just getting fewer of them. For a starter box, that’s the right trade. And because it’s plain Ampere on mature CUDA drivers, everything from Ollama to llama.cpp just works with no fuss.

Who should buy it, and who shouldn’t

Buy it if this is your first local-AI machine, or if you want a low-power card that can sit running an assistant all day without heating the room. It’s forgiving to build with: two slots, one 8-pin, 170W, and it drops into almost any case. Perfect for learning what local models can do before committing more.

Don’t buy it if you already know you want 30B-plus models or fast long-context work; you’ll bump into the 12GB wall quickly and wish you’d bought a 3090 for the extra headroom. The step up is real money, so think about where you’ll be in six months. But if the question is simply “what’s the cheapest card that runs local LLMs properly”, the 12GB 3060 is the sensible answer, and the 8GB version is not.