Private LLM Inference on Consumer Blackwell GPUs: A Practical Guide for Cost-Effective Local Deployment in SMEs

TL;DR

This paper systematically evaluates NVIDIA Blackwell consumer GPUs for cost-effective local LLM inference in SMEs, demonstrating their viability as an alternative to cloud solutions with detailed benchmarking and deployment guidance.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive benchmarking of Blackwell consumer GPUs for LLM inference, including performance, cost analysis, and deployment strategies for SMEs.

Findings

RTX 5090 outperforms RTX 5060 Ti by 3.5-4.6x in throughput

NVFP4 quantization increases throughput by 1.6x with 41% energy savings

Self-hosted inference costs are 40-200x cheaper than cloud APIs

Abstract

SMEs increasingly seek alternatives to cloud LLM APIs, which raise data privacy concerns. Dedicated cloud GPU instances offer improved privacy but with limited guarantees and ongoing costs, while professional on-premise hardware (A100, H100) remains prohibitively expensive. We present a systematic evaluation of NVIDIA's Blackwell consumer GPUs (RTX 5060 Ti, 5070 Ti, 5090) for production LLM inference, benchmarking four open-weight models (Qwen3-8B, Gemma3-12B, Gemma3-27B, GPT-OSS-20B) across 79 configurations spanning quantization formats (BF16, W4A16, NVFP4, MXFP4), context lengths (8k-64k), and three workloads: RAG, multi-LoRA agentic serving, and high-concurrency APIs. The RTX 5090 delivers 3.5-4.6x higher throughput than the 5060 Ti with 21x lower latency for RAG, but budget GPUs achieve the highest throughput-per-dollar for API workloads with sub-second latency. NVFP4 quantization provides 1.6x throughput over BF16 with 41% energy reduction and only 2-4% quality loss. Self-hosted inference costs $0.001-0.04 per million tokens (electricity only), which is 40-200x cheaper than budget-tier cloud APIs, with hardware breaking even in under four months at moderate volume (30M tokens/day). Our results show that consumer GPUs can reliably replace cloud inference for most SME workloads, except latency-critical long-context RAG, where high-end GPUs remain essential. We provide deployment guidance and release all benchmark data for reproducible SME-scale deployments.