Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) vs Qwen3.8 Max (0902)

Which is better for the money: Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA or Qwen3.8 Max (0902) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

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

Intelligence: 12.80
Total cost: $1319

AlibabaQwen3.8 Max (0902)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 45.40
Total cost: $4935

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Qwen3.8 Max (0902) scores 32.6 points higher (45.4 vs 12.8) but costs 3.7× as much to run the benchmark ($4935 vs $1319; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Qwen3.8 Max (0902) when you need intelligence above 12.8, and Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) when 12.8 is enough.

Metric	Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)	Qwen3.8 Max (0902)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	12.8	45.4	+254.7% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 3.5× more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$1,318.62	$4,934.79	+274.2% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 3.7× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	17.13s	64.77s	+278.1% Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is 278.1% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.30 / $0.90	$2.00 / $6.00
Input modalities	Text	Text, Image

Qwen3.8 Max (0902) vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning): 254.7% more intelligence, 274.2% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 278.1% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning): what beats it Qwen3.8 Max (0902): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

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.
Qwen3.8 Max (0902) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)Qwen3.8 Max (0902)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/nvidia-nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b/qwen3-8-max · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/nvidia-nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b/qwen3-8-max?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill