Mistral Small 3.1 vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Mistral Small 3.1 by Mistral or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.

Trade-off

MistralMistral Small 3.1Off the frontier

Intelligence: 7.10
Total cost: $27.8

NVIDIANemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 12.80
Total cost: $1319

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) scores 5.7 points higher (12.8 vs 7.1) but costs 47× as much to run the benchmark ($1319 vs $27.8; premium vs budget cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) when you need intelligence above 7.1, and Mistral Small 3.1 when 7.1 is enough.

Metric	Mistral Small 3.1	Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	7.1	12.8	+80.3% Nemotron 3 Super 120B… is 80.3% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$27.82	$1,318.62	+4639.8% Nemotron 3 Super 120B… is 47× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	10.82s	16.68s	+54.2% Nemotron 3 Super 120B… is 54.2% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.08 / $0.14	$0.30 / $0.90
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) vs Mistral Small 3.1: 80.3% more intelligence, 4639.8% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 54.2% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Mistral Small 3.1: what beats it Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Mistral Small 3.1 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Low) scores 21.50 for $10.6.
Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.

Mistral Small 3.1Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (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/mistral-small-3-1/nvidia-nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/mistral-small-3-1/nvidia-nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill