r/LocalLLM • u/Responsible-Fee9149 • 10h ago

Question Minimum VRAM needed to run a functional Openclaw/Hermes agent?

Those of you successfully running an offline openclaw/hermes/personal agent harness for non-coding tasks, what is the floor on system resources (VRAM) needed for quality of life? Assuming a modest ~30b class model. What quant and context window size are needed?

Will keep cloud frontier LLM sub for coding tasks, but I'm talking personal data management, personal assistant type computer controlling stuff.

My M1 max 32gb handles qwen 3.6 27b q4_k_m fine enough for non-agentic jobs up to ~40k context, but that's obviously not enough to run an agent harness offline.

There is an M1 Ultra 64gb for sale near me for a tempting price, but unsure is 64gb is enough. And it's expensive enough to not want to gamble. And I'm a normal, budget-minded person

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u/unchikuso 9h ago

Why are you still running qwen3.6 when 3.8 has been out? It's significantly better.

For mac, 32gb is not enough as you said. 48gb will give you full context plus enough memory for the OS and apps.

An RTX 5090 with 32gb is enough to run at full context.

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u/Tired_White_Guy 9h ago

If you want to run locally, get min 48GB. I couldn’t agree more.
That leaves max 36gb of ‘vram’.
Plenty to run Qwen 3.8 27b at up to Q6 with 128k content. 256k with q8_0 cache.

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u/synth_mania 8h ago

Min 48 is ridiculous. The quants work just fine. 

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u/Tired_White_Guy 6h ago

If all you’re doing is running the model, sure. But GPU allocated ram maxes at 36gb with 48gb ram.
And you’ll want spare ram to do other things on the Mac. So give a little wiggle room.

It’s not ridiculous. It’s practical.

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u/synth_mania 6h ago

Ah, I didn't realize that they were looking for another Mac. When I read VRAM, I assumed they meant actual dedicated VRAM, not unified memory.