Yes — with 22.0 GB to spare

Ministral 3 3B at Q4_K_M fits your CPU only · DDR4 dual-channel entirely on the GPU at 8K context, at an estimated 9.9 tokens per second. Past 224K the KV cache pushes it over — quantise the cache to q8_0, or step down a quantisation, to go longer.

Fully on GPU 8K context Q4_K_M · 2.2 GB Apache 2.0 Released Dec 2025 Vision

Edge model with a vision encoder and a 256K window. Apache 2.0.

What hardware do I need for Ministral 3 3B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 2.2 GB
Weights 2.2 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.81 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 22.0 GB of 25.6 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
F16 7.2 GB 8.6 GB 175K 3.0 Reference Long context
Q8_0 3.8 GB 5.2 GB 208K 5.6 −0.1% ppl Long context
Q6_K 2.9 GB 4.4 GB 217K 7.3 −0.4% ppl Long context
Q5_K_M 2.5 GB 4.0 GB 221K 8.4 −0.8% ppl Long context
Q4_K_M 2.2 GB 3.6 GB 224K 9.9 −1.9% ppl Recommended
Q3_K_M 1.8 GB 3.2 GB 228K 12 −5.4% ppl Long context
Q2_K 1.5 GB 2.9 GB 231K 14 −15% ppl Long context

Quality is the published perplexity delta against f16 weights. Max context assumes an f16 KV cache; q8_0 roughly doubles it.

How to run it

terminal
$ llama-server \
    -hf mistralai/Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512:Q4_K_M \
    -c 8192 -ngl 99

The engine underneath most of the others. Every knob is exposed. More on llama.cpp.

01Download is 2.2 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.
02With no GPU, thread count matters more than clock. Start at one thread per physical core.
03There is room to go to 224K context on this card.
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