With 9–12 GB,
here is what really runs.
Experiences reported by people using their machines every day. The figure is the reported setup capacity; multi-GPU and unified-memory layouts can behave differently.
in this range
The first local model this person actually trusts with real work
On a 12GB 5070, a heavily quantized Qwen 3.8 27B through a custom Hermes backend is, in their words, the first local model that's felt confidently productive.
Good enough for 80% of coding, honest about the other 20%
Daily local coding on a 4070 is explicitly not as good as Claude for complex refactoring — but the privacy and iteration speed still make it worth keeping.
A Hermes agent coordinating hobbies, inventories and price tracking
On an RTX 4070 and 128GB of RAM, a Hermes agent is being set up to query a private SQL database of hobby equipment and watch prices on the owner's behalf.
Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on 12GB of VRAM via RAM+VRAM offload (Strata engine)
Four quants of a vision model measured on a 12GB RTX 5070 SFF with 64GB DDR5, through a purpose-built inference engine, at 37 to 55 GB combined RAM+VRAM.
Qwen3.8 Flash Next 177B at 11-15 tok/s on a single RTX 5070 12GB with 32GB DDR4-2400
A llama.cpp expert-streaming build runs the 177B Qwen 3.8 Flash Next MoE at roughly 11.5 tok/s on a 12GB RTX 5070 and 32GB DDR4-2400 by streaming experts from SSD.
An agent that plans a wedding from your inbox
The same low-key homelab setup also runs a semi-agentic wedding planner that reads email, keeps a running database and document trail, and answers questions about where things stand — plus a separate loop that just deletes marketing mail.
Compare with another budget.
Every capacity guide, or start from your own machine and a task.