With 8 GB or less,
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
Describing security camera events on an 8GB card
A vision model on a modest 3070 turns raw detection events from a home-built surveillance system into plain-language descriptions.
Auto-filling varied lab reports from a multimodal RAG on an RTX 4060
A small research group built a deterministic local pipeline that chunks project data, finds it again with a multimodal RAG and matches it into each project's own report structure.
Creative writing and a Discord bot on an 8GB RTX 4060
A hybrid personal-assistant setup for creative writing, quick searches and Discord bot experiments on an 8GB RTX 4060, where 16GB of system RAM is the real ceiling
Making an 8GB laptop useful through DIY agent workflows
A contributor experiments with agents, tools and MCP on an 8GB laptop, using lightweight Gemma models to turn constrained hardware into a practical coding playground.
Coding on an 8GB 5060, where tuning the GPU/CPU split matters more than tok/s
A daily local coder on an RTX 5060 8GB and 32GB of RAM finds responsiveness under memory pressure matters more than benchmark speed.
Qwen 3.8 27B at ~6 tok/s on an 8GB RTX 4060 via RAM offload and MTP
A gaming PC with an RTX 4060 8GB and 32GB DDR5 runs a 17.5GB Qwen 3.8 27B by splitting it between VRAM and system RAM and adding speculative decoding, then drives it as a remote coding agent; the same machine also runs Qwen3-VL for invoice extraction.
A three-layer AMD ROCm agent architecture for 24/7 local automation
A Radeon 6650 XT runs quantized Qwen models through vLLM and Ollama, while a custom three-layer harness handles private, deterministic automation around the clock.
AI tagging for a media library on an 8GB card
Proving out AI tagging and logging for a media archive on one of the smallest cards in the thread, then building toward a self-hosted digital asset manager.
Compare with another budget.
Every capacity guide, or start from your own machine and a task.