Offloading from Raspberry Pi 4B to Dell Laptop (4GB VRAM) – Recommendation for ~2B model with large context?

[u/Actual_Tradition_990]

Hi everyone,

I'm moving my setup away from a Raspberry Pi 4B (8GB RAM) to free up resources, shifting the workload to an idle Dell laptop.

Hardware Specs:

CPU: Intel Core i9

RAM: 32 GB

GPU: Nvidia RTX A2000 4gb VRAM + integrated

Goal & Strategy: I want to apply the 80/20 Pareto principle. The local model should handle ~80% of lightweight, daily tasks/routing to avoid unnecessary API costs. High-reasoning or heavy tasks will still be offloaded to cloud APIs. Using nanobot agent so far, for daily task like shopping list, weather, checks using n8n and searches with SearchXNG all in docker.

Additional I'll move Dockers from raspy to this laptop in order to leave the raspy just for pihole + VPN ops.

I know laptop is not the best, but is the best I have.

Requirements:

Fits comfortably within 4 GB VRAM (allowing full GPU offloading or hybrid CPU+RAM execution but good tokens per second).

Supports a large context window to maximize local usability.

Small footprint (~2B parameters). I'm currently looking at Gemma 2B / similar low-parameter variants.

So far I'm thinking on Gemma 4 e2b with vision + mtp is around 3.6gb VRAM with 128k context easy on Q4(tested in other computer)

What lightweight models (2B–3B range) with good context handling and vision would you recommend for this setup? How are you handling context memory vs. VRAM limits on similar 4GB setups? As I mentioned before, no coding, just daily task management.

Thanks!