Llama 3.3
Meta's 70B offering with quality similar to Llama 3.1 405B at a fraction of the size.
Best for best-in-class 70B for desktops
Sizes 70B
Context 128K
License Llama 3.3 Community License
Min VRAM (default size, Q4) 42 GB
Rec VRAM 48 GB
What is Llama 3.3?
Llama 3.3 is Meta's open-weights language model. Released in 2024-12, it ships in 1 size (70B) and is licensed Llama 3.3 Community License. The most popular use case is best-in-class 70B for desktops.
VRAM and hardware
The 70B size fits in 42 GB of VRAM.
| Size | Min VRAM (Q4_K_M) | Recommended VRAM | Tokens/sec on 3090 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 70B | 42 GB | 63 GB | ~14 tok/s |
How to run Llama 3.3 locally
Option 1: Ollama (simplest)
ollama pull llama-3-3
ollama run llama-3-3 Option 2: Mullama (production)
mullama pull llama-3-3
mullama run llama-3-3 Option 3: llama.cpp (CLI)
# Download a GGUF from Hugging Face (search "llama-3-3 gguf")
./llama-cli -m llama-3-3.Q4_K_M.gguf -p "Hello, AI!" Option 4: Python with Mullama or llama-cpp-python
from mullama import Model, Context
model = Model.load("llama-3-3.Q4_K_M.gguf", n_gpu_layers=99)
ctx = Context(model, n_ctx=4096)
print(ctx.generate("Hello, AI!", 256)) What you can build with Llama 3.3
- chat
- code
- RAG
- agentic
Hardware it fits on
- Apple Silicon (8GB): 70B in MLX
- Apple Silicon (16GB): 70B in MLX
- Apple Silicon (32GB): 70B in MLX or GGUF
- Apple Silicon (64GB+): 70B in MLX
- RTX 3090 (24GB): 70B at Q4_K_M
- RTX 4090 (24GB): same as 3090, ~30% faster
- RTX 5090 (32GB): 70B at Q8_0
- 2× RTX 6000 Ada (96GB total): 70B at Q4_K_M
Related models in the Llama family
- Llama 3.1 — 8B, 70B, 405B · general-purpose chat, agentic workflows, code
- Llama 3.2 — 1B, 3B · low-end hardware, mobile, edge deployment
- Llama 3.2 Vision — 11B, 90B · vision + chat on desktop GPUs
- Llama 4 — Scout 17B (109B MoE), Maverick 17B (400B MoE) · vision + long context (10M tokens)
Other models you might consider
- Qwen 2.5 (Alibaba) — 0.5B, strongest 7B-32B on consumer hardware
- Qwen 2.5-Coder (Alibaba) — 0.5B, best open-weight code model in 2024-2025
- Qwen 3 (Alibaba) — 0.6B, best all-round local LLM in 2025-2026
- Qwen 3-Coder (Alibaba) — 30B, long-context code agent workflows
- DeepSeek R1 (DeepSeek) — 1.5B, reasoning, math, step-by-step problem solving
- DeepSeek V3 (DeepSeek) — 671B (37B active MoE), frontier-class open-weights LLM (needs data-center GPUs)