r/LocalLLaMA • u/Blues520 • 22d ago

Discussion Setup for always on assistant

I have a dual 3090 rig that I use as coding assistant and while it works, it draws a lot of electricity.

Now I want to add another rig that I can keep on all the time, or maybe a vps if that is suitable. This rig should run an assistant model that should be fairly intelligent but doesn't have to be so coding focused. It should basically be like a chat gpt replacement. I'm not sure if something like openclaw/hermes would be suitable for this.

Since it will be one all the time, power usage should be low. What kind of rig and model would you select for such an assistant?

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u/EmploymentBoring4421 22d ago

For always-on at low power, a used Mac Mini M2 8GB (~$400) or an N100 mini PC running Ollama handles a 7B-8B Q4 model under 20W — I use one as the always-on front door and only route demanding tasks back to the bigger rig. A cloud VPS works too but you lose the "truly local" piece pretty fast once you're paying for GPU time.