NVIDIA
Architecture
Pascal is NVIDIA's first 16nm FinFET GPU architecture, powering the GTX 10-series consumer cards and Tesla P100/P40 datacenter accelerators. It introduced unified memory architecture and NVLink interconnect for datacenter GPUs.
AI Relevance
No dedicated Tensor Cores — all AI inference runs on standard CUDA cores at FP16 or FP32 precision. Still usable for small models (7B Q4) on cards with sufficient VRAM like the GTX 1080 Ti (11 GB) or P40 (24 GB), but significantly slower than Turing and newer.
Agentic Coding
BThis model is still usable for agentic-coding, but it is not the most specialized pick. It sits in the middle of the current model mix. It fits natively with comfortable headroom.
Chat
CThis model is a direct match for chat. It sits in the middle of the current model mix. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Known channels: huggingface, ollama, lm-studio.
Coding
BThis model is a direct match for coding. It sits in the middle of the current model mix. It fits natively with comfortable headroom.
RAG
BThis model is still usable for rag, but it is not the most specialized pick. It sits in the middle of the current model mix. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Known channels: huggingface, lm-studio.
Reasoning
CThis model is a direct match for reasoning. It belongs to a current frontier family for local AI. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Known channels: huggingface, ollama, lm-studio.
Qwen2.5 3B Instruct
Qwen3.5 4B
gemma 2bQwen2.5 1.5B Instruct
DeepSeek R1 671B
Devstral 2 123B Instruct
GLM-5Qwen3.5 27BQwen3.5 35B A3BQwen3.5 9B
Kimi K2.5Mistral Large 3Mistral Small 4 119BQwen3-Coder 30B A3B InstructQwen3-Coder 480B A35B InstructQwen3-Coder-NextQwen3.5 122B A10BDeepSeek V3 671BMixtral 8x22BQwen 2.5 72BQwen 3 235B A22BQwen3-VL 30B A3B InstructQwen3.5 397B A17BDevstral Small 2 24B Instruct
Llama 3.3 70BLlama 4 Maverick 17B 128EDeepSeek R1 0528 Qwen3 8B
Command A 111BQwen 2.5 Coder 32BQwen 2.5 VL 72Bgemma 3 27b itCodestral 2 25.08Devstral Small 1.1Just out of reach
High-quality models that need a bit more memory
Upgrade paths
See what you unlock with more powerful hardware
Upgrade options
Intel Arc A550M 8GBNext step up
GTX 1070 Ti 8GBNVIDIA upgrade
Intel Arc B580 12GBBest value~$249 MSRP
~$8,000 MSRP
