Can a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, 32GB run local LLMs?
Yes — 27 of the 39 open models on this site fit in its 31 GB of usable memory, the strongest being Qwen3.8 27B. Whether that saves you money is a different question, and the answer is usually no.
Price$1,999
Memory32 GB, about 31 GB of it addressable by the GPU at 1792 GB/s
Best model it runsQwen3.8 27B — Sonnet-class, 66 tok/s
Pay-back against the APIPays back in 25 years at 500k tokens a day
Run the numbers on this machine
What it runs
| Model | Speed | Class | Good at | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27BQ4_K_M | 66 tok/s | Sonnet-class | 19 GB | |
| Qwen3.6 27BQ4_K_M | 65 tok/s | Haiku-class | 19 GB | |
| Qwen3.6 35B-A3BQ4_K_M | 235 tok/s | Haiku-class | 23 GB | |
| Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_M | 69 tok/s | Haiku-class | 18 GB | |
| Gemma 4 26B-A4BQ4_K_M | 172 tok/s | Haiku-class | 18 GB | |
| Gemma 4 31B itQ4_K_M | 48 tok/s | Haiku-class | 26 GB | |
| Granite 4.2 30BQ4_K_M | 47 tok/s | Haiku-class | 26 GB | |
| GLM-4.7-FlashQ4_K_M | 167 tok/s | Haiku-class | 20 GB | |
| Gemma 4 12BQ4_K_M | 155 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 8.0 GB | |
| Qwen3.5 9BQ4_K_M | 183 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 6.8 GB | |
| Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3BQ4_K_M | 226 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 26 GB | |
| MiniCPM5 2BQ4_K_M | 416 tok/s | Below every hosted tier | 3.0 GB |
15 more fit; the calculator lists them all.
The specifics
- Chip
- GeForce RTX 5090 — Blackwell · 32 GB GDDR7
- Memory bandwidth
- 1792 GB/s
- Usable by the GPU
- 31 GB — Bandwidth: 28 Gbps × 512-bit bus ÷ 8 = 1,792 GB/s, which NVIDIA's compare page also publishes. Usable memory is the VRAM less 1 GB: the margin llama.cpp's automatic fitting (--fit) leaves free on each device by default (common/common.h, fit_params_target = 1 GiB). Treated as nominal GB, like the other machines here.
- Power under load
- 575 W (published) — 575 W is the maker's rated board power for the card alone. The rest of the PC adds more, and LLM decoding usually draws less than the full rating. NVIDIA recommends a 1000 W system power supply.
- Availability
- Launch price. Founders Edition out of stock at NVIDIA when checked 2026-09-16; partner cards sell for more.
- Sources
- source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4, source 5, source 6