Can Nous Dolphin 13B run on RTX 5090 32GB?

YES — Runs Great

A78Great

○Estimated from fit model

Nous Dolphin 13B needs ~26.0 GB VRAM. RTX 5090 32GB has 32.0 GB. With Q5_K_M quantization, expect ~131 tok/s.

Runtime: OllamaCapacity: RoomyBandwidth: HighStack: BasicBottleneck: 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

Q5_K_M (High quality) — 26.0 GB, 130.8 tok/s, Runs well

26.0 GB required32.0 GB available

81% VRAM used

Fit status

Runs well

Decode

130.8 tok/s

TTFT

1480 ms

Safe context

16K

Memory

26.0 GB / 32.0 GB

Memory breakdown

Weights9.4 GB

KV Cache12.2 GB

Runtime1.2 GB

Headroom3.2 GB

See how fast it feels

See how fast it feelsNous Dolphin 13B on RTX 5090 32GB
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: 130.8 tok/s decode · 1.5s TTFT (warm) · 327 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	A	Runs well	130.8 tok/s	807 ms	16K
Coding	A	Runs well	130.8 tok/s	1480 ms	16K
Agentic Coding	B	Very compromised (needs ~1.5 GB host RAM)	69.8 tok/s	4034 ms	16K
Reasoning	A	Runs well	130.8 tok/s	1749 ms	16K
RAG	B	Very compromised (needs ~1.5 GB host RAM)	69.8 tok/s	5042 ms	16K

Quantization options

How Nous Dolphin 13B (13B params) fits at each quantization level on RTX 5090 32GB (32.0 GB usable).

Quant	Bits	VRAM	Quality	Fit
Q2_K	2	5.1 GB	Low	B64
Q3_K_S	3	6.4 GB	Low	B65
NVFP4	4	7.3 GB	Medium	B65
Q4_K_M	4	7.9 GB	Medium	B65
Q5_K_M	5	9.4 GB	High	B66
Q6_K	6	10.7 GB	High	B67
Q8_0	8	13.9 GB	Very High	B68
F16Best for your GPU	16	26.7 GB	Maximum	B69

Get started

Copy-paste commands to run Nous Dolphin 13B on your machine.

Run

docker run --rm -it ghcr.io/ggerganov/llama.cpp:full \
 --hf-repo "nousresearch/Nous-Dolphin-13B" \
 --hf-file "Nous-Dolphin-13B-Q5_K_M.gguf" \
 -c 4096 -ngl 99

Your hardware

More models your RTX 5090 32GB can run

Model	Params	Grade	Decode
👁 Alibaba Qwen3-Coder 30B A3B Instruct	30.5B	S	181.6 tok/s
👁 Alibaba Qwen 3.5 27B	27B	S	78.7 tok/s
👁 Alibaba Qwen 3.6 27B	27B	S	79 tok/s
👁 Alibaba Qwen 3.6 35B A3B	35B	S	128.2 tok/s
👁 Alibaba Qwen3-VL 30B A3B Instruct	30B	S	187.8 tok/s

Frequently asked questions

See all results for RTX 5090 32GB See all hardware for Nous Dolphin 13B

URL: https://willitrunai.com/can-run/nous-dolphin-13b-on-rtx-5090-32gb