The best GPU for running Gemma 2 9B (2026)
Ranked from live rental prices and computed VRAM fit, not opinion. Every card is judged at Q4_K_M — the quantisation most people actually run — at 8k context, so it's a fair comparison. A card that can't fit Gemma 2 9Bat that quality isn't listed, because it could only run a crushed version.
This model's attention shape isn't available yet (its repository is licence-gated), so we can't compute the memory fit needed to rank cards for it.
Check it yourself
See exactly what fits, at any context length
Before you buy
RTX 5090 vs two RTX 3090s
Two 3090s give you 48 GB but not double the speed for chat — llama.cpp's default multi-GPU mode makes the cards take turns. What the benchmarks actually show.
Cheapest way to serve Llama 70B
"Cheapest" flips on duty cycle and concurrency — and in Europe the electricity bill alone can approach the cost of just renting. Plus the config defaults that silently break a 16k deployment.
What --n-cpu-moe actually does
The trick that makes MoE models 5× faster — except it usually makes them slower, and the famous speedup only happens when the model didn't fit in the first place.