Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Q3_K_M) — 21 GBon NVIDIA RTX 6000

Overview

Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is a 8B parameter dense language model by Meta, with code, multilingual, tool-calls capabilities. It supports a context window of up to 131,072 tokens.

Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is an 8-billion-parameter dense transformer model from Meta, designed for instruction following, code generation, and multilingual tasks. It offers a strong balance of quality and efficiency in the small-model category, outperforming many 7B-class alternatives on standard benchmarks. The model supports tool calling and eight languages including English, German, and French. With a 128K context window and flash attention support, it runs comfortably on a single consumer GPU at Q4 quantization levels.

At Q3_K_M quantization (low quality tier), the model weighs 3.74 GB. This fits within the 48 GB of VRAM on NVIDIA RTX 6000, enabling full GPU inference.

Hardware Requirements

Model size	3.74 GB
VRAM available	48 GB
VRAM used	21 GB
System RAM
Min RAM required	0 GB
GPU layers	32 / 32
Context size	131,072
Backend	cuda13
Flash attention	Yes
Reading from disk	Yes

Deploy

Prerequisites

Ensure your GPU nodes are prepared with the NVIDIA container toolkit:

ansible-playbook prositronic.infra.nvidia_container_toolkit

Command

helmfile --state-values-file <(curl -s https://www.prositronic.eu/values/meta-llama-3-1-8b-instruct/q3_k_m/nvidia-rtx6000.yaml) apply

Generated `values.yaml`

/values/meta-llama-3-1-8b-instruct/q3_k_m/nvidia-rtx6000.yaml

Loading values…

Install llama.cpp

Install llama.cpp from the official build instructions for your platform and backend.

Download Model

curl -L -o meta-llama-3-1-8b-instruct.gguf "https://huggingface.co/bartowski/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-Q3_K_M.gguf"

Start Server

llama-server \
  -m meta-llama-3-1-8b-instruct.gguf \
  --n-gpu-layers 32 \
  --ctx-size 131072 \
  --flash-attn

Verify

curl http://localhost:8080/health

Frequently Asked Questions

How much VRAM does Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Q3_K_M) need?

The Q3_K_M quantization of Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct requires 3.74 GB. All 32 layers fit in the 48 GB of VRAM available on NVIDIA RTX 6000, enabling full GPU acceleration.

Can I run Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct on NVIDIA RTX 6000?

Yes. NVIDIA RTX 6000 provides 48 GB of VRAM, which is enough to run Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Q3_K_M) with all layers on the GPU for optimal performance.

What is quantization?

Quantization reduces a model's numerical precision from its original floating-point format to a more compact representation. This shrinks the file size and VRAM footprint, making it possible to run large models on consumer hardware. The trade-off is a small reduction in output quality. Q3_K_M compresses Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct from its original size down to 3.74 GB.

What quantization should I choose for Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct?

Q3_K_M is a low-quality quantization. Higher-quality quants (Q8, Q6) preserve more model accuracy but need more VRAM. Lower quants (Q4, Q3, Q2) reduce VRAM usage at the cost of some quality. Choose based on your available hardware and quality requirements.

What is flash attention and why is it enabled?

Flash attention is a memory-efficient algorithm that speeds up the attention mechanism in transformer models. It reduces VRAM usage during inference by avoiding the materialisation of the full attention matrix. For Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct on NVIDIA RTX 6000, flash attention is enabled to maximise context length and throughput within the available 48 GB of VRAM.

How do I run Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Q3_K_M) with Ollama?

Run ollama run llama3.1:8b-instruct-q3_k_m to start Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Q3_K_M). Ollama handles downloading the model weights automatically on first run.

Last updated: March 5, 2026