PNY Tesla T4 16GB GDDR6 datacenter

The PNY Tesla T4 is a datacenter GPU with 16GB of GDDR6 that's become a favorite for budget local AI inference. It's passively cooled, draws just 70W, and fits in a single slot. Don't buy it for gaming, but for running 7B and 13B LLMs at home, it's a quiet and affordable workhorse.

The T4 posts a PassMark G3D score of 10,117, which puts it in the 25th percentile for raster performance. That's not great if you're trying to play Cyberpunk, but for AI inference workloads it's a different story. Our AI score lands at 67th percentile, which is solid for a card this old. The 16GB of GDDR6 at 77th percentile is the real star here, letting you run models that would choke on cards with half the memory.

The 1590MHz boost clock doesn't sound impressive on paper, and honestly it isn't. But the T4 was never about raw clock speed. It's about memory bandwidth and the ability to keep a model resident in VRAM. In practice, you'll get decent tokens per second on 7B models and workable speeds on 13B models with quantization. Just don't expect it to touch a modern RTX card for anything involving ray tracing or high refresh rate gaming.

Stacked against modern cards like the ASUS PRIME RTX 5080 or the Gigabyte AORUS RTX 5080, the T4 looks ancient. Those cards have more VRAM, way more compute, and actual video outputs. But they also cost several times more and draw way more power. The T4 isn't competing with those cards, it's competing with used GTX 1080 Tis and RTX 2060s for the budget AI builder's dollar.

The MSI Ventus RTX 5070 Ti is an interesting comparison point. It has the same 16GB of VRAM but with dramatically better compute and modern features. If you can stretch your budget, the 5070 Ti is the better buy for mixed use. But if you're building a dedicated inference box that sits in a closet and crunches tokens all day, the T4's passive cooling and 70W power draw are genuinely hard to beat. The Sapphire NITRO+ is an AMD card that doesn't really compete here at all, AMD's AI software stack is still playing catch-up for this kind of work.

Value is tricky here because the price spread is genuinely wild. In Europe you'll see listings from EUR 756 to EUR 1,136 for the same card, and in Canada the gap is even bigger at CAD 975 to CAD 1,649. If you're paying the low end of those ranges, the T4 is a compelling budget AI card. At the high end, you're getting into used RTX 3090 territory, which would absolutely demolish the T4 for both AI and gaming. The USD 588 listing we found is the sweet spot if you can get it at that price. Shop around, check the used market, and don't overpay for the PNY branding when the underlying card is identical across vendors.

The PNY Tesla T4 is a datacenter card that's found a second life with home lab folks and AI tinkerers. It's built around NVIDIA's Turing architecture with 16GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit bus, and it sips power at just 70W with passive cooling. No fans, no noise, just a single-slot card that fits in most servers and even some compact workstations. Prices are all over the place depending on where you shop, from EUR 756 to EUR 1,136 in Europe and CAD 975 to CAD 1,649 in Canada, so shopping around matters more than usual here.

People searching for this card usually want to know one thing: can it run local AI models? The short answer is yes, and it does it surprisingly well for the money. The 16GB of VRAM is the headline feature, letting you load 7B and 13B parameter models without breaking a sweat. It's not going to win any gaming benchmarks, but that's not what it's for.

We've seen a lot of these cards pop up in our database as people build budget inference rigs. The T4 sits in a weird spot, it's old enough to be cheap on the used market but still capable enough to be genuinely useful. That combo is rare in the GPU world right now.

Skip the T4 if you want to play games, drive multiple monitors, or do any kind of graphics work. It has zero display outputs and its raster performance is genuinely weak. If you need a card that does AI and gaming, look at a used RTX 3090 or a new RTX 5070 Ti instead. Also skip it if your case has poor airflow, passive cooling needs moving air to work, and a hot closet server will thermal throttle this card fast. And if you're not comfortable hunting for deals, the price spread between vendors is big enough that you could easily overpay by hundreds of dollars.

Should you buy a PNY Tesla T4 in 2025? If you want a quiet, low-power card for running local LLMs and you can find one at the lower end of the price range, absolutely. The 16GB of VRAM is the killer feature, and the passive cooling means you can stick it in a home server without adding fan noise. It's a niche card for a niche use case, but it nails that use case.

If you want to game, edit video, or do anything that requires a display output, look elsewhere. This card has no video ports and its raster performance is firmly in the bottom quarter of what we've tested. But for the specific job of running AI models locally without breaking the bank or your power bill, the T4 remains a surprisingly relevant piece of hardware.