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

A practical guide to running LLMs on budget hardware: real speeds, real stories, and real conclusions 📌 Table of Contents My Setup (The "Weak" PC) Why I Did This The 5 Models I Tested The Test Method Model 1: LFM2.5-350M – The Speed Demon Model 2: Qwen3 0.6B – The Balanced One Model 3: LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct – The All-Rounder Model 4: Gemma-3-1B-Uncensored – The Comedian Model 5: DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B – The Misfit Final Comparison Table Key Lessons Learned My Final Recommendation Conclu...