Can the NVIDIA RTX 5070 run Llama 3.1 8B?

Yes
QuantQ8_0Near-lossless
Memory10.2 GBof 12 GB
Speed~47tokens/s

Yes. The NVIDIA RTX 5070 can run Llama 3.1 8B fully in VRAM at Q8_0 (near-lossless), using about 10.2 GB of the 12 GB available, at roughly 47 tokens/second.

Try other context lengths in the calculator →

Memory needed by quantization

At 8,192 tokens of context.

QuantQualityMemoryFits?Speed
FP16Full quality17.7 GBToo big—
Q8_0Near-lossless10.2 GBFits~47 tok/s
Q6_KExcellent8.3 GBFits~61 tok/s
Q5_K_MVery good7.4 GBFits~71 tok/s
Q4_K_MGood, most popular6.5 GBFits~83 tok/s
Q3_K_MNoticeably degraded5.6 GBFits~103 tok/s
Q2_KHeavily degraded4.7 GBFits~134 tok/s

How to run Llama 3.1 8B on the NVIDIA RTX 5070

With Ollama installed, one command downloads and starts it:

ollama run llama3.1:8b

Ollama's default download is Q4_K_M (about 6.5 GB here). You have room for Q8_0, which is near-lossless: pick that GGUF in LM Studio or from Hugging Face.

GPUs that run Llama 3.1 8B comfortably

Models that run well on the NVIDIA RTX 5070

Run it in the cloud

Don't want to buy hardware? Run Llama 3.1 8B on a rented GPU today.

Rent a cloud GPU by the hour. No upfront cost, cancel any time.