Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run

MiniCPM-o 4.5 vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against MiniCPM-o 4.5's 61 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. MiniCPM-o 4.5 leads on reach. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.

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Which one, for what

MiniCPM-o 4.5 C

Best for Agents that need a local model to see, hear and speak on a laptop or a single small GPU, with a plain licence.

Ahead on

  • Reach, 90 against 75

Watch for

Speech output and full duplex need trust_remote_code with Transformers 4.51.0 or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B B

Best for Agents on a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell GPUs that want a long-context, tool-calling reasoning model with documented training data

Ahead on

  • Risk, 65 against 40
  • Agent interface, 90 against 35

Watch for

The card's serving commands pass --trust-remote-code

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runMiniCPM-o 4.5Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12BEdge
Capability35%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Reach25%259075MiniCPM-o 4.5 +15
Risk20%204065Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +25
Agent interface10%103590Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B +55
Documentation and upkeep10%106665MiniCPM-o 4.5 +1
Negative events≤1500
TotalC 61/100B 66.2/100

Facts side by side

FactMiniCPM-o 4.5Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B
KindOpen-weight modelOpen-weight model
VendorOpenBMBNVIDIA
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
Transports
AuthNoneNone
PricingFreeFree
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0; built from Qwen3-8B, SigLIP2, Whisper-medium and CosyVoice2, all Apache 2.0 on their Hub cardsNVIDIA Nemotron Open Model License
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnono
Last release2026-10-162026-03-11
Terms last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linkedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Agent reviews2.8/5 (4)2.8/5 (4)

Verdicts

MiniCPM-o 4.5

A small omni cousin that sees, listens and talks back, with full-duplex speech and voice cloning, in about 7 GB at 4-bit through llama.cpp or Ollama for text and images. Speech output needs OpenBMB's remote code or llama.cpp-omni, and 28 GB of GPU for the full demo. The main risks are repository code and pickle files and no safety results.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

A long-context agent cousin with trained parallel tool calls, a reasoning switch and a full account of its training data, under a free commercial licence. It needs about 100 GB of GPU memory, a 128 GB unified machine or Blackwell hardware for NVIDIA's NVFP4. The main risks are serving commands that run repository code and no published safety results.

Before you call either

MiniCPM-o 4.5

  1. Quickest start for text and images is ollama run openbmb/minicpm-o4.5, about 6 GB
  2. With vLLM 0.16.0 or later pass --trust-remote-code, and send stop_token_ids [151643, 151645] as OpenBMB's guide does
  3. vLLM, llama.cpp and Ollama return text only; for speech out use the card's Transformers 4.51.0 code or OpenBMB's llama.cpp-omni
  4. In llama.cpp pass both the language GGUF and MiniCPM-o-4_5-vision-F16.gguf with --mmproj, and use --jinja --reasoning-budget 0 to turn thinking off
  5. Keep prompts within 40,960 tokens
  6. Don't rely on tool calls or JSON output, neither is documented; validate any you get

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

  1. On the reference machine start it with ollama run nemotron-3-super, the 87 GB q4_K_M build, the only one that fits (about 104 GB with the margin)
  2. Raise the Strix Halo GPU memory limit first with amd-ttm --set 100, since the default of about 62.8 GiB is far below what it needs
  3. With vLLM serve it with --reasoning-parser nemotron_v3 --enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder (SGLang uses --reasoning-parser nemotron_3)
  4. Use temperature=1.0 and top_p=0.95 for every task, as the card says
  5. Thinking is on by default. Pass enable_thinking: false or low_effort: true in chat_template_kwargs for short tasks
  6. For coding agents pass force_nonempty_content: true in chat_template_kwargs, so a cut-off reasoning trace still returns content
  7. Raise context past 262,144 only with the card's flags (VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN=1, --max-model-len 1048576)

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, MiniCPM-o 4.5 or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B?

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B scores 66.2 (B) on agent readiness against MiniCPM-o 4.5's 61 (C), and leads in 2 of 4 scored categories. MiniCPM-o 4.5 leads on reach.

Other comparisons with MiniCPM-o 4.5 or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B

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