Can Ministral 3 8B run on RTX 4080 Laptop 12GB?

YES — Tight Fit

A83Great

○Estimated from fit model

Ministral 3 8B needs ~10.9 GB VRAM. RTX 4080 Laptop 12GB has 12.0 GB. With Q4_K_M quantization, expect ~69 tok/s.

Runtime: SGLangCapacity: TightBandwidth: LowStack: OptimizedBottleneck: Balanced

Operating mode

Choose the run profile you care about

Interactive favors responsiveness, while light API and scale-out lean harder on serving readiness. The fit stays the same, but the recommendation lens changes.

Current mode

Balanced

Balanced for general local use. Keeps the ranking neutral across personal and serving workflows.

Capabilities:

Select quantization to explore

Q4_K_M (Medium quality) — 10.9 GB, 74.2 tok/s, Tight fit

10.9 GB required12.0 GB available

91% VRAM used

Fit status

Tight fit

Decode

74.2 tok/s

TTFT

2608 ms

Safe context

24K

Memory

10.9 GB / 12.0 GB

Memory breakdown

Weights4.9 GB

KV Cache2.2 GB

Runtime2.6 GB

Headroom1.2 GB

See how fast it feels

See how fast it feelsMinistral 3 8B on RTX 4080 Laptop 12GB
1st promptCold start — includes initialization
>What is local AI inference?
Local AI inference means running an AI language model directly on your own hardware — your laptop, desktop, or server — instead of sending requests to a remote cloud API.

When you run inference locally the model weights are loaded into your GPU or unified memory. Each token you generate requires reading those weights from memory, so memory bandwidth is the main bottleneck for decode speed.

Key benefits of running locally:
 - Full privacy: your prompts never leave your machine
 - No per-token cost or rate limits
 - Works offline once the model is downloaded
 - Latency depends only on your hardware
2nd promptWarm — model ready, no init overhead
>How much VRAM do I need?
It depends on the model size and quantization level. A rough rule of thumb:

 Model size Q4 (4-bit) Q8 (8-bit) FP16
 7B params ~4.3 GB ~7.5 GB ~14 GB
 13B params ~7.9 GB ~13.9 GB ~26 GB
 70B params ~42.7 GB ~74.9 GB ~140 GB

Most people use 4-bit quantization (Q4_K_M) which gives 90-95% of full quality at a fraction of the memory. A 24 GB GPU can comfortably run most 7B-13B models.
Estimated: 74.2 tok/s decode · 2.6s TTFT (warm) · 186 tok/s prefill

What limits this setup

This setup is broadly balanced for this model.

No major red flags

This recommendation has enough memory headroom and acceptable estimated speed for the selected workload.

Best improvement path

Performance by workload

Workload	Grade	Fit	Decode	TTFT	Context
Chat	S	Runs well	74.2 tok/s	1423 ms	24K
Coding	A	Tight fit	69.0 tok/s	2804 ms	24K
Agentic Coding	F	Too heavy	46.5 tok/s	6059 ms	24K
Reasoning	A	Tight fit	74.2 tok/s	3082 ms	24K
RAG	F	Too heavy	46.5 tok/s	7574 ms	24K

Quantization options

How Ministral 3 8B (8B params) fits at each quantization level on RTX 4080 Laptop 12GB (12.0 GB usable).

Quant	Bits	VRAM	Quality	Fit
Q2_K	2	3.1 GB	Low	A80
Q3_K_S	3	3.9 GB	Low	A81
NVFP4	4

Get started

Copy-paste commands to run Ministral 3 8B on your machine.

Run

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/ggerganov/llama.cpp:full \
 --hf-repo "mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512" \
 --hf-file "Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512-Q4_K_M.gguf" \
 -c 4096 -ngl 99

Frequently asked questions

See all results for RTX 4080 Laptop 12GB See all hardware for Ministral 3 8B

URL: https://willitrunai.com/can-run/ministral-3-8b-on-rtx-4080-laptop-12gb

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