Table of Contents
VRAM or generation? The RTX 4060 8 GB is two generations newer than the 3090 but has one third the VRAM. For LLM hosting, the right answer depends entirely on which models you want to run.
For 7B+ FP16: RTX 3090 is the better card (24 GB matters more than newer arch). For INT4 only or embeddings/Whisper-only: RTX 4060 is competitive and slightly newer. For most production LLM hosting in 2026: RTX 3090.
The fundamental decision
- RTX 4060 8 GB: 2-generation-newer Ada Lovelace, 8 GB GDDR6, 272 GB/s, ~15 FP16 TFLOPS.
- RTX 3090 24 GB: older Ampere, 24 GB GDDR6X, 936 GB/s, ~36 FP16 TFLOPS.
The 3090 has 3× the VRAM, 3.4× the memory bandwidth, 2.4× the FP16 throughput. The 4060 has more efficient power consumption and slightly newer kernels.
Workload-by-workload
| Workload | RTX 4060 8 GB | RTX 3090 24 GB | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral 7B FP16 | does not fit | 720 tok/s | 3090 |
| Mistral 7B INT4 | ~280 tok/s | ~410 tok/s | 3090 |
| Phi-3 Mini FP16 | ~310 tok/s | ~620 tok/s | 3090 |
| Llama 3 8B INT4 | ~250 tok/s | ~390 tok/s | 3090 |
| Whisper Large-v3 | ~5× RTF | ~6× RTF | tied |
| SDXL 1024² FP16 | ~12 s | ~5 s | 3090 |
| BGE embeddings | ~38K/s | ~58K/s | 3090 |
Verdict
The RTX 3090 wins essentially every LLM benchmark we run. It’s older, but the VRAM and bandwidth advantage dominates. The 4060 is the right pick only when you have a hard 8 GB workload and 4060 stock pricing is dramatically cheaper.
Bottom line
Newer is not better when VRAM is the binding constraint. For LLM hosting at £159-200/mo, the RTX 3090 24 GB at £159/mo is the right starting point.
