Can You Run LLMs Locally Without a GPU? I Tested 8 Models on Linux
Its's FOSS, Friday, May 15th, 2026
Testing 8 LLMs on CPU-only machines shows that models up to 3-4B parameters can run usably with proper quantization.
The author tested eight different LLMs on an Intel i5 laptop with 12GB RAM to determine which models run acceptably without a GPU. Using tools like Ollama and quantization formats like GGUF, they found that smaller models (0.6B-3B parameters) achieve usable performance, with tokens-per-second being the key metric for practical usability rather than just whether a model runs.
The sweet spot is 1B-2B models using Q4_K_M quantization, which balance speed (15-30 tokens/sec), RAM usage, and output quality. Models like Qwen 0.6B, TinyLlama 1.1B, and Gemma 3 1B proved most practical for everyday use on low-end hardware.