Yes — with 10.8 GB to spare

Ministral 3 3B at Q4_K_M fits your GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB entirely on the GPU at 8K context, at an estimated 125 tokens per second. Past 114K 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 10.8 GB of 14.4 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
F16 7.2 GB 8.6 GB 65K 38 Reference Long context
Q8_0 3.8 GB 5.2 GB 98K 71 −0.1% ppl Long context
Q6_K 2.9 GB 4.4 GB 106K 92 −0.4% ppl Long context
Q5_K_M 2.5 GB 4.0 GB 110K 107 −0.8% ppl Long context
Q4_K_M 2.2 GB 3.6 GB 114K 125 −1.9% ppl Recommended
Q3_K_M 1.8 GB 3.2 GB 118K 155 −5.4% ppl Long context
Q2_K 1.5 GB 2.9 GB 121K 181 −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
$ ollama pull ministral-3:3b
$ OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=8192 \
    ollama run ministral-3:3b

The default. One binary, a model registry, an OpenAI-compatible port. More on Ollama.

01Download is 2.2 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.
02Close anything else holding VRAM. A browser with hardware acceleration can sit on 1–2 GB.
03There is room to go to 114K context on this card.
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