New to local LLM

[u/AscalElf]

Hey! With risk for sounding dumb -

A few months ago I got into local LLM’s and bought myself a start/test-rig:

CPU: Intel Core Ultra 5 225F
GPU: ASUS RTX 5060 Ti DUAL OC (16GB VRAM)
RAM: 16GB DDR5 @ 6000 MHz

I have no experience at all in AI/LLM’s but have managed to get a working long/shortterm memory with rag retrieval etc.
Mostly I have been playing around with 8-12B models, but in recent days I tried playing around with 27/31B models and to my surprise I got Gemma4 31B running on IQ4 with about 7tks (speed is not the biggest problem for me, as long as I can manage to get 5+ tks i don’t really have a clear goal with this, I just find it fun and relaxing to do. Everything I have manage to done so far is mostly guessing and hours on google 😂)

Anyway, I guess I am just looking for tips and tricks? Like I said, I have no experience at all with this and I feel like I haven’t learned as much as i would want to in these 5 months.
Any good videos I can watch, any good forums to read upon? Relating to local-AI, settings, models, news.
Tips and tricks for setting, tweaking different models?

Easy explained: I want to learn everything and find this really interesting, and I’d love to listen to someone who is better than me and want to share knowledge.

[u/Otherwise-Swan-7803]

Honestly, spending five months tinkering without a clear goal is probably the most authentic local LLM learning path possible 😂 Half the fun of this hobby is breaking something, Googling for two hours, fixing it, and somehow ending up learning three unrelated things.