▲ local intelligence

will it local

Best local LLMs for the NVIDIA GTX 970

4GB · Maxwell

The infamous 3.5GB+0.5GB split-VRAM card — OOM cliffs long before 4GB. Class E dead-end: the advisor says so plainly and offers the cheapest real step up instead.

Dead end for LLMs

This card is below the useful floor for local LLM inference — we say so plainly and point at the cheapest real step up instead.

→explore the full catalogupgrade paths with live prices · what fits on each machine

Speed

no computed band (non-banded class)

What fits (computed)

—

Cited community benches

no single-card bench published — band is computed (see notes)

Runs fully in memory (machine alternatives)

Nominal bandwidth: — GB/s — see the effective decode window above

→ qwen3:0.6b on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) 0.6B · 0.6GB · needs ~1GB (4k ctx)

→ qwen3:1.7b on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) 1.7B · 1.4GB · needs ~1.8GB (4k ctx)

→ qwen3:4b on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) 4B · 2.6GB · needs ~3.2GB (4k ctx)

→ llama3.2:1b on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) 1B · 1.3GB · needs ~1.4GB (4k ctx)

→ llama3.2:3b on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) 3B · 2.0GB · needs ~2.4GB (4k ctx)

→ gemma3:1b on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) 1B · 1.0GB · needs ~1.1GB (4k ctx)

→ phi4:mini on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) mini 3.8B · 2.5GB · needs ~3GB (4k ctx)

→ moondream:2b on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) 2B · 1.7GB · needs ~3.7GB (4k ctx)

→ whisper:tiny on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) tiny · 0.1GB · needs ~2.1GB (4k ctx)

→ whisper on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) base · 0.3GB · needs ~2.3GB (4k ctx)

→ whisper:small on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) small · 0.9GB · needs ~2.9GB (4k ctx)

→ kokoro:82m on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) 82M · 0.3GB · needs ~2.3GB (4k ctx)

→ gemma3:4b on Tesla M60 (16GB, used) ($35) 4B · 3.3GB · needs ~3.8GB (4k ctx)

Borderline — runs, but offloads

→ deepseek-r1:7b distill 7B — 4.9 GB vs 4 GB usable — partial CPU offload, expect large speed loss

→ mistral:7b 7B — 4.6 GB vs 4 GB usable — partial CPU offload, expect large speed loss

Gotchas

⚠ 3.5GB + 0.5GB VRAM split: usable memory is 3.5GB, then hard stalls

⚠ Pre-tensor Maxwell

Where to go next

gtx-1050-ti

cheapest real 4GB entry — runs 3B/4B Q4 fully

→ its best-models page

gtx-1650

first card where 8B Q4 fully fits (4GB)

→ its best-models page

2026-10-01 · ← full hardware catalog · fit = working set vs VRAM · speeds are community-reported, cited in our knowledge base