Home / Compare / NVIDIA RTX 8000 48 GB vs NVIDIA RTX 5090 32 GB

Local AI comparison · not a winner

NVIDIA RTX 8000 48 GB vs NVIDIA RTX 5090 32 GB for local AI

Canonical GPU chips, not ASUS vs MSI coolers. Memory fit uses calculator v1.0.0. Speed uses published llama.cpp estimates only. Query states (model / quant / context) are not indexed.

Decision dimensions

These are facts from the existing memory calculator, performance cache, and Amazon summary. This page does not pick a winner.

NVIDIA RTX 8000 48 GBNVIDIA RTX 5090 32 GB
Advertised VRAM48 GB32 GB
Usable VRAM (calculator 90%)43.2 GB28.8 GB
ArchitectureTuringBlackwell
MemoryGDDR6 · 672 GB/s · 384-bitGDDR7 · 1792 GB/s · 512-bit
Models fully fitting at Q4 / 8K4847
Limited context / offload / does not fit0 / 7 / 00 / 7 / 1
llama.cpp short-context coverageunavailableavailable
Mapped / Amazon-matched SKUs1 / 08 / 8
Lowest fresh matched Amazon cardCheck availability$4799.99 Check price
Current price per advertised VRAM GB$150 / GB

Prices are the lowest fresh Amazon-matched board-partner SKU in the last 24 hours, not MSRP. Price per GB is that price divided by advertised VRAM — not a value score.

Workload

Runtime is llama.cpp CUDA — the only runtime with published Phase 5 estimates. Changing the model does not create a new indexable URL.

What each GPU uniquely fits

Full VRAM fit at Q4 / 8K among published calculation-supported models. Identical coverage is reported as such — it is not turned into a winner.

Fits fully only on NVIDIA RTX 8000 48 GB (1)

Fits fully only on NVIDIA RTX 5090 32 GB (0)

None

47 models fit fully on both · examples: Code Llama 34B Instruct, Qwen3 32B, DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B, Qwen2.5 32B Instruct, Qwen2.5-Coder 32B Instruct, QwQ 32B, Gemma 2 27B Instruct, Mistral Small 24B Instruct.

llama.cpp performance

Reuses Performance Model v1.0.0 published rows only. Short-context llama-bench pp512/tg128. Not 8K–128K speed. Methodology

Select a model to load published decode estimates for the same workload on both GPUs.

What this comparison shows

Board power / TDP is not compared: RigForAI does not yet have a single normalized watt metric. Energy per token is out of scope. This is not a best-GPU ranking.

See GPUs under a budget · Value explorer