Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Llama 3.3 70B Instruct scored 42.5% and Ministral 3 8B 2512 42.5% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 is 2.0× cheaper per question as billed ($0.00027 vs $0.00053), reasoning tokens included.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 generates text 3.0× faster: 124 tokens per second against 42.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 starts answering sooner: 0.3 s to the first token, against 0.7 s for Llama 3.3 70B Instruct.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 accepts more context: 262k tokens against 131k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Llama 3.3 70B Instruct for shorter outputs (about 855 tokens per question against 1,496) and more hosts to choose from on OpenRouter (9 against 1). Choose Ministral 3 8B 2512 for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.00063 against $0.0013), faster streaming, a quicker first token and a 262k-token context window. The widest subject gap is in economics: Ministral 3 8B 2512 answered 7 of 9 correctly, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct 5 of 9. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap +0.0 points (z = 0.00). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.