The best GPU for running Mistral Small 24B (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 Mistral Small 24Bat that quality isn't listed, because it could only run a crushed version.
Best value
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Best throughput per dollar among cards that fit.
Cheapest that runs it
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Lowest hourly rental that fits it — $0.107/hr, Q4_K_M.
No compromise
—
Most headroom and highest throughput.
Every card that runs it, ranked
Best quantisation each card fits at 8k context, with the cheapest live rental and a bandwidth-derived throughput estimate. Sorted by tokens/sec per dollar.
| GPU | VRAM | VRAM used | ~tok/s | Cheapest rental | tok/s per $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q Workstation Edition | 96 GB | 15 GB16% | — | $1.690 | — |
| NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition | 96 GB | 15 GB16% | — | $1.870 | — |
| NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation | 48 GB | 15 GB32% | — | $0.494 | — |
| AMD Radeon PRO W7900 | 48 GB | 15 GB32% | — | — | — |
| NVIDIA RTX A6000 | 48 GB | 15 GB32% | — | $0.420 | — |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 | 32 GB | 15 GB48% | — | $0.441 | — |
| NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada Generation | 32 GB | 15 GB48% | — | $0.389 | — |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 | 24 GB | 15 GB64% | — | $0.107 | — |
| AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX | 24 GB | 15 GB64% | — | — | — |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti | 24 GB | 15 GB64% | — | $0.122 | — |
| NVIDIA RTX A5000 | 24 GB | 15 GB64% | — | $0.201 | — |
| NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 | 24 GB | 15 GB64% | — | — | — |
How this ranking is made — and its limit
Fit and throughput are computed from Mistral Small 24B's own configuration with the engine behind our cost-to-run page (bits-per-weight validated to 0.7% median error). Rental prices are the cheapest live figure across the providers we track, last updated Fri, 30 Oct 2026 22:20:13 GMT.
The value column ranks renting, because that's what we can price precisely. If you're buyinga card, the fit and throughput columns are exactly what you need — but we don't publish a purchase-price value ranking, because we don't have verified street prices and won't invent them. For the buy-vs-rent decision itself, see the guides below.
Tokens/sec is a bandwidth-derived estimate, not a benchmark — we don't run our own hardware tests (editorial policy).
Check it yourself
See exactly what fits, at any context length
Running Mistral Small 24B: common questions
How much VRAM do you need to run Mistral Small 24B?
Can an RTX 4090 run Mistral Small 24B?
Can an RTX 3090 run Mistral Small 24B?
Can an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB run Mistral Small 24B?
What's the cheapest way to run Mistral Small 24B?
Before you buy
Run Mistral Small 24B locally
VRAM by quant (Q4 ~14 GB, Q8 ~25 GB, BF16 ~55 GB), which cards clear it, what tokens/s to expect from published benchmarks — and what a 24 GB card rents for when yours doesn't.
Cheapest RTX 4090 rental
Live per-hour 4090 prices on Vast and Runpod, the spot-vs-on-demand lever, and what a 24 GB card actually runs — the rent-a-card answer for everything in the 14B–32B class.
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.
GLM-4.5-Air on local hardware
The consumer-runnable GLM: VRAM by quant, which cards and unified-memory boxes clear it, and what to expect from published numbers — the written companion to this page.