GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB
The cheapest new NVIDIA card with 16GB, which quietly makes it the budget local-AI default.
Average in-stock listing $1,077 on Sep 26, 2026 (lowest $740), 2.5 times the $429 launch MSRP. See its price history. The links open live listings. Amazon links may earn us a commission.
Will it run your models?
VRAM meterLocal AI fit: up to low-20B class models. Rule of thumb for 4-bit quantized models; context length and other apps eat into the same memory.
Open models that fit comfortably at Q4
- gpt-oss-20b 21B · 11.7 GiB · headroom 2.8 GiB
- DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B 14.8B · 8.3 GiB · headroom 6.2 GiB
- Qwen3 14B 14.8B · 8.3 GiB · headroom 6.2 GiB
- Phi-4 (14B) 14.7B · 8.2 GiB · headroom 6.3 GiB
- Gemma 3 12B IT 12.2B · 6.8 GiB · headroom 7.7 GiB
- Mistral NeMo 12B Instruct (2407) 12.2B · 6.8 GiB · headroom 7.7 GiB
- Qwen3.5 9B 9.65B · 5.4 GiB · headroom 9.1 GiB
- Gemma 2 9B IT 9.24B · 5.2 GiB · headroom 9.3 GiB
Tight but possible: Codestral 22B v0.1, Mistral Small 3.2 24B Instruct (2506), Gemma 4 26B-A4B IT.
What it costs to run
180W of board power, 4 hours a day under load, priced at the residential electricity rate where you live. Pick a state and the numbers update.
Board power is the rated maximum; real gaming load usually sits below it and idle is a few watts, so treat this as the ceiling. Rates: EIA residential average, May 2026. See every card ranked by running cost →
Why you buy it
- 16GB VRAM at the lowest price in NVIDIA's current stack
- CUDA support for every AI tool that matters
- Low 180W power draw
Why you hesitate
- Gaming performance is midrange, the price is for the memory
- An 8GB variant exists to confuse buyers, avoid it
The editor's take
As a gaming card it is merely fine. As a budget AI card it is the pick: 16GB and CUDA at $429 means 13B-class models run without drama, and nothing else new does that this cheap. Skip the 8GB version of this card entirely; the memory is the entire point.
Decided?
Live listings for the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, straight from the retailers.
Average in-stock listing $1,077 on Sep 26, 2026 (lowest $740), 2.5 times the $429 launch MSRP. See its price history. Amazon links may earn us a commission.