Best local LLM for rtx 2080 ti
Last updated 2026-05-26 · Page updated 2026-07-13
Top 7 open-source picks for rtx 2080 ti, ranked by benchmark performance and real-world fit. Updated monthly.
Qwen 3 14B
A 14B dense model from Alibaba that matches Qwen 2.5 32B Base on STEM and code, with the same hybrid thinking system as the rest of the Qwen 3 family. The pragmatic sweet spot for a single 24GB GPU.
Phi-4 Reasoning 14B
Microsoft's 14B reasoner that beats R1-Distill-Llama-70B on AIME and GPQA with 50x fewer parameters. MIT-licensed, English-first, with a 32K context.
DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B
DeepSeek's R1 reasoning distilled into Qwen 14B under MIT. AIME24 69.7 and MATH-500 93.9 — beats o1-mini on most reasoning benchmarks.
Qwen 2.5 VL 7B
A 7B vision-language model from Alibaba with state-of-the-art results in its class, scoring 95.7 on DocVQA. Handles hour-long video, bounding-box grounding, and multilingual OCR.
Qwen 2.5 Omni 7B
Alibaba's first true omni-modal open model — text, image, audio, and video in, with text and speech out. A research-grade preview rather than a production-ready release.
Qwen 3.5 9B
Alibaba's next-generation dense 9B model with a 262K native context window and an improved toggleable thinking mode. Apache 2.0 licensed.
Qwen 3 VL 8B
The dense 8B entry in Qwen 3 VL, offering strong OCR and document analysis with a remarkable 256k multimodal context for its size.
Which GPU should you buy to run Qwen 3 14B?
To run Qwen 3 14B locally at Q4, you need ~9 GB of VRAM. The best value for this is a RTX 5070 (12 GB VRAM).
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Frequently asked questions
What is the best local LLM for rtx 2080 ti?
Qwen 3 14B tops this ranking — a 14B model, licensed under Apache 2.0, needing about 9 GB of VRAM at Q4 quantization. See the full list below for the runner-ups and how they compare.
How much VRAM do I need to run Qwen 3 14B?
At Q4 quantization, Qwen 3 14B needs about 9 GB of VRAM and fits comfortably on a single 24 GB GPU.
Which of these models fit an 8 GB GPU?
At Q4 quantization, Qwen 2.5 VL 7B, Qwen 2.5 Omni 7B, Qwen 3.5 9B, Qwen 3 VL 8B fit within 8 GB of VRAM.
Are the models on this rtx 2080 ti list free for commercial use?
Licenses across this list include Apache 2.0, MIT. Check the specific license of each model on its catalog page before deploying commercially, as terms vary by author.
What context window do these models support?
Context windows on this list range from 32k to 256k tokens, depending on the model.