Local LLM Bench: MoE vs Dense on One RTX 3090
I went looking for sustained-load benchmarks comparing MoE and Dense coding models on consumer GPUs. Not demo bursts on a Mac Mini — sustained autoregressive generation on real coding tasks, where architecture and interconnect are the only variables. I found plenty of one-shot numbers. Nobody had published the comparison that matters: same hardware, same quantization, same inference engine, MoE versus Dense, across GPU configurations. Methodology visible. Numbers verifiable. So I ran the tests. Dual RTX 3090s with NVLink, custom liquid cooling, a 6 kW isolation transformer feeding a double-conversion UPS. Not elegant, but thermally and electrically honest — sustained inference loads without throttling, no measurement fiction. The hardware details are below. ...