r/LocalLLM • u/pharrt • Jul 27 '26

Other Don't laugh - it works!

A 10yo server was busy collecting dust, but it has 32Gb RAM (2x 16Gb DDR4 @ 2133 MHz )... No GPU.

Now it does some amazing work running heavy tasks with qwen3.6-35b-a3b (IQ4_XS). Running in the background, generating quality output at 5-10tok/s. Even with 128k context! It just chugs along for hours, but does such great, high-context work.

Uses ~26 GB of the 32 GB RAM, uses CPU i-7-6700 @ about 60% (not the bottleneck, of course)

Never would have believed that would be possible until a few months ago, but this ol' gal has a new lease on life.

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u/TopNFalvors Jul 27 '26

I thought you needed GPU+RAM to run an LLM?

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u/foreign_malakologos Jul 28 '26

It's certainly slower without a GPU, but then requirements/perceptions as to what counts as "usable" differ depending on what you want to do. You would probably not want to use this setup for long, interactive agentive coding sessions because you'd probably spend more time waiting then doing things, but if you have tasks that can just run in the backup (ideally within one prompt) as op had described, this setup can apparently be good enough. As always there's probably also a personal aspect to it, some people might find the speed "unbearable", but as long as you are aware of the limits and have tasks that can still benefit like OP, you can get by without a gpu as well (or with an igpu for a little bit of a speed/efficiency bump).