Yeah no prob: IQ3. Sounds ridiculously small but works really well.

Not sure, haven’t tried LM Studio.

It doesn’t. Use Strata to run it. Choose the recommended settings it gives you during the install. People can run it with 12GB of VRAM and 32GB of system RAM. It partially loads the most common parts of the model I’m VRAM and swaps from RAM when needed. Rarely it needs to grab from the SSD, but it’s swapping while processing so it doesn’t seem slow at all. I get around 60-80 tokens per second on average. 16GB VRAM and 48GB RAM.

I get where you are coming from. I thought it would run slow AF as well before I tried it. 😄

I encourage you to give Qwen 3.8 flash next a try. It’s amazing what a typical gaming machine can do with it.

Many groups are making models now. I see a future where we have open source data sources, models, and weights. Niche groups can extend models to be trained on whatever they want.

I just got Qwen 3.8 Flash Next running locally. It’s damn good on an older machine with a newer GPU. Local LLMs should scare them the most.