Best local AI model for RTX 3090 24GB.

A better 2026 pick than Qwen3-30B-A3B or a generic dense 32B if your runtime supports it. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B has a strong 2026 benchmark profile with only ~3B active params. 24GB is the inflection point where this class becomes practical at Q4.

Recommendation Full matrix

01 / Recommendation

Run this size class.

Recommended default

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B Q4

Use Q4 GGUF, modest context. This is the highest-scoring current open-weight model that fits this card cleanly, selected by benchmark then fit then freshness, not by parameter count.

Benchmark anchor

MMLU-Pro 85.6 BF16 / 85.0 NVFP4 · GPQA Diamond 84.9 / 84.8 · SciCode 40.8 / 40.6 · AIME 2025 89.2 / 88.8 (NVIDIA Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4 card).

Evidence

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B has stronger 2026 benchmark evidence than older 70B compatibility models; NVFP4 loses little vs BF16 in NVIDIA's published table.

02 / Alternates

Other realistic picks.

Qwen3-30B-A3B fallback

Qwen3-32B dense at Q4

Gemma 3 27B (niche only)

03 / More GPUs

Compare another card.

RTX 3060 12GB RTX 4060 Ti 16GB RTX 5080 16GB RTX 4090 24GB RTX 5090 32GB