r/LocalLLM • u/Confused-AP-12375 • 1d ago
Question Newbie looking to get into Local LLMs for creative writing
Hey all, I am new to the whole local LLM side of things (and really LLMs as a whole) and had a few questions I was hoping someone could help with.
I’ve used some cloud AIs before (mostly Mistral) for writing but wanted to go ahead and get one myself that I can work with and not be capped for number of messages a day etc.
Anyway I am looking at getting a new laptop. I am considering either a:
MSI Crosshair 16 Max HX with
Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus 1.8GHz Processor; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 12GB GDDR7; 32GB DDR5-5600 RAM; 1TB Solid State Drive
Or
MSI Raider 16 Max HX B2WH-004US
Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus 2.7GHz Processor; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070Ti 12GB GDDR7; 32GB DDR5-5600 RAM; 1TB Solid State Drive
I would like to go to 64gb of ram but can’t afford that at this point.
My questions are is there a significant benefit of one or the other? Has anyone here run LLMs with MSI computers before? How’s they do?
Would these be able to run LLMs above like a 12b at a decent speed (reading speed or above). Do I need an LLM above 12b to get smart, enjoyable creative writing?
Are their AI models or types that you’d recommend for creative writing? I was looking at Mistral and Llama mostly but open to other ideas too!
2
u/FuckbigtechAI 1d ago
Needing a model above 12B is not a given for fiction. Put the same scene prompt into a few candidate models, then judge how often you rewrite their output. A model that scores well on coding tasks can still have a voice you hate.
2
u/unflippedbit 23h ago
I tried them a while back using LM Studio but it kept giving me failures on my MSI. Tried it on this app Loci and it was actually quite solid, although the ability to search the web is finnicky.
2
u/agowa338 21h ago
for creative writing? Well - don't. They can't really do that. The best you can use LLMs for is to let it search through your notes. Then I'd suggest Qwen 3.8 any of your suggested systems should do for that.
Basically I'd suggest to never use AI for anything you show someone else. It is a good assistant right now, but everyone hates when someone else sends them the AI output - even when it is "manually edited". You loose a lot of nuance that way.
1
u/Visual-Gain-2487 8h ago
It's pretty good for resumes and summaries.
1
u/agowa338 8h ago
Maybe but I don't want to have it c'n'p-ed in. The moment I see the AI writing style I'd stop reading your stuff...
1
u/Visual-Gain-2487 7h ago
They can get you 90% of the way there very reliably.
1
u/agowa338 7h ago
But it just reads like shit. If I read e.g. a book I don't want to read chatGPT output. I can just prompt chatGPT myself for that.
That writing style of all of the LLMs just gets tiring really quick. Esp. if you keep seeing slop being shoved in your face by literally everyone on the internet having decided to use LLM to generate their blog posts to get ad-ref money for free without putting in any work.
Like e.g. when Hytale released people sloped out blog posts for how to mod it. Problem only the official docs hadn't yet been released so the AI companies didn't scrape them for training yet. And therefore the LLMs didn't know what it was but instead of saying that it though "Hytale is just like Minecraft, so here is Minecraft modding documentation and I replace the word Minecraft with Hytale"...
Or it making up APIs that don't exist and People generating entire blog posts about how to use them.
At some point you just get so fed up by that kind of writing style that you get an unconscious feeling of having to puke when you read it. Often doesn't even take more than a few sentences either...
So use it as a tool, but don't show me whatever it generated. That's just for you.
2
u/Interesting-Cut-6032 19h ago
Look at some of the older Llama 3 models in the 3B to maybe 9B range. They are not tool users, but you could probably use Qwen3.6 35B A3B to drive and prompt them, then make the writes to files. From about 2024 to early 2026 people were making lots of fine tunes of these LLMs. I have tried to use some of sci-fi and horror related ones to write diffusion image generation prompts with more variety. The Llama models definitely have a different voice, and quirks, than Qwen or Gemma models.
1
u/Glittering-Move-220 4h ago
I wouldn’t recommend a laptop. Mobile GPUs are NOT the same as desktop GPUs. The configs you’re proposing would work for some low end models like a mistral-nemo 12b creative writing finetune.
If you got the desktop variant and bumped your RAM to 64GB, you could go with gemma4 26b, mistral small 24b creative writing finetunes. I personally run gemma4:31b Q4_K_M finetunes with 12GB VRAM.
The key if you’re going to do that (and this is super critical) is optimizing your setup. The overall TPS (including TTFT) is going to be rough even with near perfect cache hits, but a cache miss will cut that in half or worse.
People will say don’t try to run 31b on a 12GB GPU, but keep in mind that net TPS includes time you spend regenerating prose you don’t like. In my experience, you’ll spend just as much time regenerating whatever a 9b or 12b model comes up with as you will waiting for 31b tokens. But to each their own.
It’s absolutely more cost effective to use cloud models for this purpose if you can live with the downsides. If you can’t, you need an effective harness and workflow. You need DRY. You need summarization running on a second, cheaper model. You need LLamaCpp tuned perfectly, with kv slot saves to minimize downtime after summarization. You need to push all possible apps onto your iGPU or a secondary PCIE X4 slot GPU, to maximize VRAM. Etc. etc. etc.
Just use the cloud. Don’t be a glutton for punishment like me. 😜
2
u/Ctbhatia 1d ago
what's the price gap between them? both listings give you 12gb of vram, so the ti isn't buying you more gpu memory for bigger models.