Claude Opus 5 (Max) vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Opus 5 (Max) by Anthropic or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Opus 5 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 50.80
Total cost: $7275

NVIDIANVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 8.90
Total cost: $63.7

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Opus 5 (Max) scores 41.9 points higher (50.8 vs 8.9) but costs 114× as much to run the benchmark ($7275 vs $63.7; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Opus 5 (Max) when you need intelligence above 8.9, and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoni… when 8.9 is enough.

Metric	Claude Opus 5 (Max)	NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	50.8	8.9	−82.5% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 82.5% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$7,274.74	$63.74	−99.1% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 99.1% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	82.33s	10.12s	−87.7% NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nan… is 87.7% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$5.00 / $25.0	$0.05 / $0.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) vs Claude Opus 5 (Max): 82.5% less intelligence, 99.1% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 87.7% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Opus 5 (Max): what beats it NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Opus 5 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium) scores 34.50 for $56.4.

Claude Opus 5 (Max)NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-opus-5/nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill