NVIDIA · RTX 40

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090

$1400$1599 MSRP

The RTX 4090 remains the gold standard for local AI in 2026. Its 24GB of GDDR6X VRAM hits the professional sweet spot — running 32B parameter models at Q8 quality and Llama 70B at Q4 quantization. Despite being a previous-generation card, it is still one of the fastest gaming GPUs available and has the most mature driver and software ecosystem. Used 4090s represent the best value proposition for serious AI builders.

Best ForThe all-rounder — serious AI inference + top-tier gaming

VerdictStill the best single GPU for local AI work in terms of price-to-VRAM ratio.

9/10

Gaming

10/10

Specifications

VRAM24GB GDDR6X

Memory Bandwidth1008 GB/s

CUDA Cores16,384

Boost Clock2520 MHz

TDP450W

Power Connector1x 16-pin

Length336mm

Form FactorTriple Slot

Release Year2022

AI Capabilities

Sweet Spot24GB VRAM

The professional standard. Handles most models with smart quantization.

Can run (Q4 quantized)

Llama 3.1 8BQwen 2.5 32BQwen 2.5 14BMistral 7BFLUX.1 DevStable Diffusion XLStable Diffusion 3.5 LargeHunyuanVideoCogVideoX-5BMochi 1LTX VideoStable Video DiffusionWan Video 14BCodestral 22BQwen 2.5 Coder 32BLLaVA 1.6 34BAlphaFold 2ESMFold (ESM-2 15B)ESM-2 3BscGPTRFdiffusionFine-tune Llama 8BTrain SDXL LoRATrain FLUX LoRA

Recommended system RAM for AI: 48GB+ (2x GPU VRAM for model overflow)