作者: Jakub Rusinowski · 最后更新: 2026年9月6日
Model library → Ministral 3 → Ministral 3 8B
The balanced middle of the Ministral 3 range at 5.6 GB Q4_K_M — comfortable on an 8 GB card and the natural replacement for a Llama 3.1 8B install. Vision-capable, 128K context, Apache 2.0.
Ministral 3 8B needs about 6 GB of VRAM at Q4_K_M — quantized weights plus framework overhead, before any KV cache. On Apple Silicon that figure comes out of unified memory.
| Parameters | 8 Billion |
| Context window | 131,072 |
| Architecture | Dense Transformer (vision) |
| Provider | Mistral AI |
| Licence | Apache 2.0 |
| Specified at | Q4_K_M |
| System RAM | 16 GB |
| Record updated | 2026-09-06 |
Apache-2.0 — commercial use permitted. Commercial use permitted. No usage restrictions beyond attribution.
Modelled on a reference NVIDIA RTX 4090 (24 GB), with no KV cache (this record has no published architecture). Speed figures are ESTIMATES from the memory-bandwidth roofline described on the methodology page, not benchmarks we ran — rows marked measured come from published or reader-submitted runs. VRAM here includes the KV cache, so it reads higher than the headline figure above, which does not.
| Quant | Weights | VRAM needed | Est. speed | Fit on 24 GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q2_K | 2.6 GB | 3.4 GB | ~154 tok/s (est.) | Fits comfortably |
| Q3_K_M | 3.4 GB | 4.2 GB | ~133 tok/s (est.) | Fits comfortably |
| Q4_K_M | 4.8 GB | 5.6 GB | ~107 tok/s (est.) | Fits comfortably |
| Q5_K_M | 5.7 GB | 6.5 GB | ~95 tok/s (est.) | Fits comfortably |
| Q6_K | 6.6 GB | 7.4 GB | ~86 tok/s (est.) | Fits comfortably |
| Q8_0 | 8.5 GB | 9.3 GB | ~70 tok/s (est.) | Fits comfortably |
| F16 | 16.0 GB | 16.8 GB | ~41 tok/s (est.) | Fits comfortably |
Want the memory numbers alone, at every quantization level and your own context length? Use the Ministral 3 8B VRAM calculator.
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The cheapest catalogued GPU that runs Ministral 3 8B is the Intel Arc B570 (10 GB).
Install Ollama, then run:
ollama run ministral-3:8b
Weights on Hugging Face: mistralai/Ministral-3-8B-Instruct.
Best for: general purpose, edge devices, multimodal, chat.
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