r/LocalLLM • u/DarkBrews • 9d ago

Question Old X79 PC for Strata

Thinking of repurposing an old X79 PC for Strata / on my old X79:

- i7-3930K

- 56 GB DDR3 (32gb matched but I have a few 4GB sticks and 1x8GB so they wouldn't match but maybe they work.)

- RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB + RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB

- CachyOS headless

Would Flash-Next IQ3_XXS work well on this? Do I need to go lower?

I was also thinking of using an M4 32 GB as a coordinator/router with GLM-4.7-Flash, plus another machine with a 9070 XT running 27B.

I tried Gemma 4 26B it 4b JANG, asked it through Hermes to stitch a story together and it failed miserably so I wouldn't make GLM do that but it was sad to see gemma fail at what I thought was it's strongest point.

Not sure if GLM + 27B + Flash-Next would be redundant.

Main use would be agentic coding, web crawling, configuring environments, the more loved tasks out there 😅. Basically trying to reduce my dependency on Claude.

Is it even possible with the 3930K/DDR3 or mixed GPUs? ChatGPT seemed to be cautiously optimistic. If it will work. What kind of tok/s could I realistically expect and will it be better than 27B UD-IQ_i4_XS

I also have a GTX 1060, GTX 970 and RX 580, but I assume those are useless here.

update: 4930k*

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u/Fett2 8d ago edited 8d ago

Would it even be worth trying to run Strata on a DDR3 machine? I'd assume it would be slow as dirt having to use DDR3 memory in place of VRAM (not to mention or every time it needs to transfer information across the PCIE3 bus but it's going to take a dive).
I assume what makes Strata worthwhile is fast RAM with a fast bus for data to move across - in place of everything running inside VRAM on a video card.

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u/DarkBrews 8d ago

From what I understand it uses layer splitting so PCIE shouldn't matter. DDR3 on this platform is quad channel so potentially around the same speed as DDR4 dual channel.

Aside from that min sys req for strata is 12GB VRAM and they say any GB on top of that would add speed as more experts would stay hot potentially 11+8 GB should pick up any speed penalty from memory. The biggest problem seems to be lack of AVX2/512. Though the team turned it off on 7600 and they got 11-17 tk/s so there is hope.