How I Tested 5 Small LLMs on a Weak PC (Intel i5, No GPU) – And Found a Winner

Short summary

Developer benchmarked 5 small LLMs (350M–1.5B params) on real budget hardware (Intel i5, 16GB DDR4, no GPU) to identify the best CPU-only model. LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct won with excellent coherence/humor at 13.5 tokens/sec; LFM2.5-350M was 3x faster but lower quality. Practical methodology and recommendations for developers choosing models for resource-constrained environments.

• •Tested 5 small LLMs on Intel i5 with no GPU; LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct is the clear winner for all-around performance
• •Speed-quality tradeoff documented: 350M model is 3x faster but noticeably lower coherence/humor than 1.2B variant
• •Single-channel RAM bandwidth (~20GB/s) is the real bottleneck on budget hardware, not CPU speed

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