NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB

The RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is the cheapest brand-new card that hands you a proper 16GB of VRAM for local LLMs. It’s low-power, quiet, and it fits almost anywhere. Just don’t expect it to be quick; the memory bandwidth is where the budget bites, and it bites hard.

The take

Buy it for 16GB on a warranty at low wattage, not for speed. The extra memory lets you hold models a 12GB card can’t, and 165W means it sips power and runs cool enough to forget about. But the 288 GB/s memory bandwidth is slow for inference, and inference speed lives and dies on bandwidth. So you get the capacity without the pace. For a quiet, always-on box that values headroom over throughput, that trade can be exactly the right one.

What it’ll actually run

Sixteen gigabytes opens up 14B models at Q4 with a comfortable context, and it’ll take a 32B at a tight quant if you’re patient. Smaller 7B to 8B models sit in VRAM with plenty of room to spare. The capacity is properly useful and a clear step past the 12GB crowd, which is the reason anyone reaches for this card.

The catch is speed. That 288 GB/s bandwidth caps throughput hard, so expect something like 15 to 25 tokens/sec on a 7B at Q4 and single figures to low teens on a 14B. Fine for chat and coding help, frustrating for long documents or batch work. It’s the capacity of a much dearer card at the pace of a cheap one, and no amount of tuning changes that; the memory bus is what it is. On value, around £400 for 16GB is roughly £25 per gigabyte, respectable for a new card with a warranty, and the low 165W board power makes it the easy pick for a machine that runs all day without heating the room or spinning fans up. Drivers are current Ada CUDA, so every inference stack works with no fuss.

Who should buy it, and who shouldn’t

Buy it if you want new-with-warranty 16GB, low power, and a quiet build, and you’re happy trading speed for capacity and peace of mind. It’s the friendliest card here to live with: one 8-pin, two slots, cool and near-silent. First-timers who want to run 14B models without any used-market worry are the sweet spot.

Skip it if speed matters at all; a used 3090 gives you more VRAM and far more bandwidth for similar money, if you’ll accept the used market. And if you want properly fast 16GB and can spend, the 5080 is quicker by a mile at several times the price. But as the cheap, cool, capacious new option, the 4060 Ti 16GB has a real place.