Guides, answers & tools

AI & Local LLMs

Local models, AI rigs and the tools that run them

Freshly updated

how to run Flux locally in 2026 — the best AI image model, on your own GPU →Updated Nov 9, 2026
Which GPU should you buy for Stable Diffusion and Flux? The pick for every budget →Updated Nov 9, 2026
how to run Stable Diffusion locally and make AI images for free on your own PC →Updated Nov 9, 2026
No good GPU? The cheapest way to make AI images: a free app, a paid app or a rented GPU →Updated Nov 9, 2026
No Nvidia Card? Running Stable Diffusion and FLUX on AMD Radeon and Intel Arc (2026) →Updated Nov 9, 2026
AI video cost per clip: an app, an API, or a rented GPU? (And what's legal in the US) →Updated Nov 9, 2026

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Which Gemma 4 fits your GPU? Line drawing of a graphics card with a card reading Gemma 4 31B at Q4_K_M with 8K context needs about 19.1 GB, from our VRAM engine on Nov 3, 2026

Which Gemma 4 size fits my GPU? E4B, 12B, 26B-A4B or 31B, by VRAM

8GB gets E4B, 12GB gets 12B, 16GB gets 12B at Q8 (or 26B-A4B with Google's own 4-bit file), and 24GB gets 26B-A4B or 31B. The VRAM for each size and quant, the exact Ollama tag (the bare one pulls a small model), the 4K-context default that catches Ollama users on cards under 24GB, and when Qwen3.8 27B is the better pick.

Aliteq Team · Updated Nov 6, 2026 · 13 min

Illustration for running Qwen3.8 Flash Next locally: a small graphics card working alongside system RAM and an SSD

Run Qwen3.8 Flash Next locally: the 8GB, 12GB, 16GB and 24GB setups that work (Nov 2026)

A 125B model on a gaming card sounds wrong. Flash Next uses only 6B parameters per token, so the experts can live in system RAM and the n-gram table on your SSD. What each card size needs, which quants people run, and where the quality argument stands.

Aliteq Team · Nov 1, 2026 · 11 min

Night line-art stopwatch next to the headline: One AI video clip, app, API or a rented GPU? A card reads: Wan 2.2, 5 s clip, 24 GB GPU, 71 s with the Lightning LoRA.

AI video cost per clip: an app, an API, or a rented GPU? (And what's legal in the US)

I read the Reddit threads, the licences and the price pages so you don't have to. What one 5-second clip really costs in Higgsfield, through an API, and on a rented RTX 4090, plus the MiniMax H3 licence line almost nobody mentions.

Ari Vale · Updated Nov 9, 2026 · 14 min

Kimi K3 'Open Frontier Intelligence' announcement page from Moonshot AI

Kimi K3 API: how to get a key, what it costs per 1M tokens, and whether it's free

The Kimi API is pay as you go from Moonshot's own platform, and Kimi K3 unlocks after a $1 top-up; we found no free tier, only a $5 voucher once you have added $5. Here are Moonshot's real per-million-token prices, the same-model price on Novita AI, and why running K3 yourself is not a realistic option.

Aliteq Team · Oct 30, 2026 · 11 min

Flat illustration on an orange background of one person carrying a large gold key to a safe while another points in alarm at a key left inside an open browser window

DeepSeek API: how to get a key, what it costs per 1M tokens, and the truth about "free"

The DeepSeek API is pay per token. You get a key from DeepSeek's own platform, and it only works once you add money; we found no free tier on DeepSeek's pages. Here are the real per-million-token prices, the off-peak rate most US users get by default, a same-model price check against Novita AI, and what is actually free.

Aliteq Team · Oct 29, 2026 · 11 min

Macro photo of two identical blank black chips side by side on a dark circuit board with gold contact pads, lit in indigo-violet light

Slow Local LLM? Speculative Decoding Explained for llama.cpp and vLLM

A small model guesses the next few words and the big one checks them all at once. Same answers, fewer slow steps. What the original paper measured, what llama.cpp and vLLM actually let you switch on, and when it won't help.

Aliteq Team · Oct 16, 2026 · 9 min

Hand-drawn editorial illustration of a laptop with a tall stack of off-white memory blocks on its keyboard, part of the stack lifted by a violet hand pulling a lever along a coral dashed line

MLX vs llama.cpp on a Mac: Which Runtime to Pick, and the Memory Limit That Matters

Four ways to run a local model on Apple silicon: mlx-lm, llama.cpp, Ollama and LM Studio. I read each project's docs to sort out who each is for, which model files they take, and the one sysctl the MLX README tells you to try when a model runs slow.

Aliteq Team · Oct 16, 2026 · 9 min

Hand-drawn editorial illustration of a hand pressing down the lid of a suitcase packed so full of paper cards that a fan of coral cards spills out, on a near-black background in indigo-violet and off-white

Out of memory at long context? Shrink the KV cache with q8_0 (llama.cpp and Ollama)

The model fits. Then you paste in a long document and the GPU runs out of memory. The culprit is the KV cache, it has a formula you can do on a napkin, and two settings cut it by roughly half or three quarters.

Aliteq Team · Oct 16, 2026 · 9 min

Photo of a small plain black cube computer on a dark wooden desk at night, a thin cable trailing off, indigo-violet light behind it and a coral desk lamp in soft focus

Got a Strix Halo or a 128GB Mac? The Best Local LLMs for 128GB of Unified Memory

128GB does not mean 128GB for the model. Plan on 96GB, and the box becomes a home for 100B-plus Mixture-of-Experts models. Five picks by job, with the math shown.

Aliteq Team · Oct 16, 2026 · 11 min

Flat vector illustration of a woman dropping a paper document onto a large map of dots, with a coral arrow pointing it to the cluster of similar coral dots, on an indigo-violet background

Embedding Models Explained: Dimensions, Storage Cost and the Re-Embedding Bill (2026)

Your RAG search lives or dies on one small model most people never pick on purpose. What an embedding is, why 3,072 dimensions costs eight times the storage of 384, how to read the MTEB leaderboard without getting fooled, and what switching models really costs.

Aliteq Team · Oct 16, 2026 · 11 min

Thumbnail reading Cached tokens: 95% off, with a screenshot of Anthropic's pricing table and a card showing the Claude Sonnet 5.5 cache read price of $0.10 per million tokens, read Nov 3, 2026

How much does prompt caching save on Claude and OpenAI? About 90% of input, if your traffic comes back in time

A cache read now costs 5% of normal input on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol. What that does to a real bill, the hit rate where caching stops paying, and what breaks a cache, from both vendors' own pages read Nov 3, 2026.

Aliteq Team · Updated Nov 6, 2026 · 9 min

FLUX on 12 GB? Yes, shrunk. Thumbnail with a screenshot of the city96 FLUX.1-dev-gguf file list on Hugging Face and a card showing the 4-bit Q4_K_S file at 6.81 GB, read Nov 3, 2026

How much VRAM do I need for FLUX, SD 3.5 and SDXL? 12 GB runs all but FLUX.2 dev

SDXL fits any 8 GB card. FLUX.1 dev needs 16 GB at fp8 or 12 GB as a 4-bit GGUF, SD 3.5 Large 12 GB at fp8, and FLUX.2 dev 24 GB even at 4-bit. Every number comes from the model files on Hugging Face, re-read Nov 3, 2026, with the rule we used printed.

Aliteq Team · Updated Nov 6, 2026 · 11 min

A laptop with a blank dark screen on a rolling cart in a long, dim data-center aisle lined with black server racks and a few green status lights

NVIDIA's Free Hosted Models at build.nvidia.com: What the Free API Key Really Allows

Voltage read NVIDIA's FAQ, its API Trial Terms and the forum replies. The key is free, the credits are gone, the rate limit isn't printed, and customers are off limits.

Aliteq Team · Oct 16, 2026 · 8 min

Line-art illustration on a dark background next to the headline: One LM Studio switch Put MoE expert weights on the CPU. A card reads Setting: MoE on CPU (LM Studio).

LM Studio's 'force MoE weights onto CPU' slider: fit a 30B model or Qwen3.8 Flash Next

It started as a toggle and became a layer slider in LM Studio 0.4.0. Where it lives, what it moves, the number to set on an 8, 12 or 16GB card, whether LM Studio runs Qwen3.8 Flash Next, and why Mac MLX models don't have the setting.

Aliteq Team · Updated Nov 1, 2026 · 8 min

Line-art illustration on a dark background next to the headline: Ollama and MoE No --n-cpu-moe. Here is what it does. A card reads Common mistake: Defaults (context + quant).

Ollama has no --n-cpu-moe switch. What it does with MoE experts, and Qwen3.8 Flash Next

The GitHub request to keep MoE experts in RAM is still open after 15 months. But since Ollama 0.30, llama.cpp's own fit step can park them there for you, as long as you leave num_gpu alone. Plus what Ollama's Qwen3.8 Flash Next tags need, and why Reddit can tell when you're running Ollama.

Aliteq Team · Updated Nov 1, 2026 · 8 min

Line-art illustration on a dark background next to the headline: Qwen3.8 27B needs VRAM by quant, and the 16GB squeeze. A card reads Reddit pick: 10-16GB #1 (r/LocalLLaMA).

Qwen3.8 27B Hardware Requirements: VRAM by Quant, How 16 GB Owners Run It, and Why It Can Disappoint

A 24 GB card runs Qwen3.8 27B at Q4 or Q5, and 32 GB runs Q6 with room to spare. 16 GB works too, at a 3-bit quant with a squeezed cache. Here is the math, what Reddit owners report, and what to check when it codes badly.

Aliteq Team · Updated Nov 1, 2026 · 12 min

Best LLM for a 32GB RTX 5090 thumbnail: Qwen3.6 35B-A3B at Q5_K_M with the 128K context Qwen asks for, next to a screenshot of the Qwen model card advising at least 128K tokens, and a card reading 27.1 GB of 32 from our VRAM engine, Nov 3, 2026

What is the best local LLM for a 32GB RTX 5090? Qwen3.6 35B-A3B, and four more that fit

For most RTX 5090 owners it is Qwen3.6 35B-A3B at Q5_K_M with the 128K context Qwen asks for, about 27 GB of the card's 32. Four more picks by job, the VRAM worked out for each, and what still doesn't fit. Checked Nov 3, 2026.

Aliteq Team · Updated Nov 3, 2026 · 11 min

Night line-art illustration next to the headline: Which local AI runtime? Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM, Strata. A card reads llama.cpp server default port: 9931 (its README · read 1 Nov 2026).

Ollama vs llama.cpp vs LM Studio vs vLLM: pick by who's using it

One person on one machine, or a team hitting one server? That decides it. Then licence, hardware, ports, security defaults, and where Strata fits. Read Nov 1, 2026.

Aliteq Team · Updated Nov 1, 2026 · 10 min