16 GB · 448 GB/s
What can the NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB run?
NVIDIA’s cheapest new card with 16 GB. Quiet and low power, but slower.
Best models for each task
Our top three for this machine. Chat and image tasks assume an 8K-token conversation; coding, documents and agents assume 32K.
Chat & writing15 of 25 run
- Gemma 4 12BRuns wellQ8_0 · needs 14.1 GB at 8K · 20–35tok/sSmooth
- Qwen3.8 27BRuns wellUD-IQ3_S · needs 14.5 GB at 8K · 20–35tok/sSmooth
- MiniCPM5 2BRuns greatQ8_0 · needs 4.0 GB at 8K · 80–130tok/sFast
Coding12 of 26 run
- Qwen3.5 4BRuns greatQ8_0 · needs 7.2 GB at 32K · 45–75tok/sFast
- Gemma 4 12BRuns greatQ4_K_M · needs 9.2 GB at 32K · 35–50tok/sFast
- Ornith 1.5 9BRuns wellQ8_0 · needs 11.9 GB at 32K · 25–40tok/sSmooth
Long documents9 of 20 run
- Qwen3.5 9BRuns wellQ8_0 · needs 12.5 GB at 32K · 25–40tok/sSmooth
- MiniCPM5 2BRuns greatQ8_0 · needs 5.1 GB at 32K · 60–100tok/sFast
- Gemma 4 12BRuns greatQ4_K_M · needs 9.2 GB at 32K · 35–50tok/sFast
Agents & tools12 of 26 run
- Qwen3.5 4BRuns greatQ8_0 · needs 7.2 GB at 32K · 45–75tok/sFast
- Ornith 1.5 9BRuns wellQ8_0 · needs 11.9 GB at 32K · 25–40tok/sSmooth
- MiMo-V2.6 9BRuns wellQ8_0 · needs 12.5 GB at 32K · 25–40tok/sSmooth
Images in6 of 13 run
- Qwen3.8 27BRuns wellUD-IQ3_S · needs 14.5 GB at 8K · 20–35tok/sSmooth
- Gemma 4 12BRuns wellQ8_0 · needs 14.1 GB at 8K · 20–35tok/sSmooth
- Qwen3.5 9BRuns greatQ8_0 · needs 11.7 GB at 8K · 25–45tok/sSmooth
Make images6 of 6 run
- Stable Diffusion XL Base 1.0Runs greatFP16 · needs 7.9 GB
- FLUX.2 [klein] 4BRuns wellBF16 · needs 14.0 GB
- Z-Image-TurboRuns great4-bit GGUF · needs 5.0 GB
Speak text7 of 7 run
- Qwen3-TTS 1.7BRuns greatBF16 · needs 5.5 GB
- Kokoro-82MRuns greatFP32 · needs 1.4 GB
- Chatterbox Multilingual V3Runs greatFull · needs 4.2 GB
Transcribe6 of 7 run
- Whisper large-v3-turbo (via faster-whisper)Runs greatFP16 · needs 2.6 GB
- Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6BRuns greatFP32 · needs 3.5 GB
- Qwen3-ASR 1.7BRuns greatBF16 · needs 5.7 GB
Biggest model it runs well
Qwen3.8 27B (UD-IQ3_S, 12.0 GB file) at about 20–35tok/sSmooth.
Should you buy it?
Buy it if
You want a new, quiet 16 GB card on a budget.
Skip it if
You can stretch to a used RTX 3090 (about $1,000–$1,500) — 24 GB and twice the bandwidth.
Watch out for
- Buy the 16 GB version, not the 8 GB one.
- Lower bandwidth (448 GB/s): bigger models run slower.
Measured on this hardware
Real runs from public sources, not estimates. All measurements.