Hi all!

i have written a couple of posts in the past, i am an illiterate having fun with LLMs and AI in general, who is being pulled in in a deeper hole by the days…

I have extensive experience with Linux (Gentoo lover since 20 years here) i am a sw dev now “promoted” to management, and avid tech user, so not really illiterate, but i know very little about all this LLM game.

I started with OpenWebUI + Ollama and played as an idiot with random models. Then come across an NVIDIA RTX A4000 (16gb VDDR6) and plugged into my I7-8700 server with 64gb RAM. The server has a Intel Corporation CoffeeLake-S GT2 [UHD Graphics 630] too, unused at this time (server is 100% headless anyway).

I am currently installing LocalAI to run llama.cpp and improve my models capability and speed, planning to ditch OpenWebUI and Ollama, if LocalAI + llama.cpp works fine.

My first usage was chatting with random local models. Then i discovered Fooocus and quickly upgraded to ComfyUI. Last, i have set up my SubWave radio station and i am having so much fun…

I have a few questions:

  1. Can i leverage both my NVIDIA and the iGPU at the same time?
  2. If i use the iGPU do i need to fixedly allocate RAM from the BIOS to it? Or will it use system RAM as needed?
  3. Using llama.cpp i want to leverage also CPU usage, since i have 64gb ram (also shared by many more self hosted stuff, tough) is there anything special i need to do to achieve that?
  4. What are a set of models that you guys recommend for my setup? I am currently using qwen2.5-coder:14b-instruct-q5_K_M with ollama, and i am pretty satisfied with it’s coding capabilities, but i want something more general purpose for my SubWave (AI assisted web radio channel)
  5. I might have the opportunity to install a second RTX A4000, identical to the first, on my server (need to check pci-e slot availability and power supply specs), would that make any sense at all?
  6. Power consumption wise, do the NVIDIA cards suck power also when not in active use?
  • SuspiciousCarrot78@aussie.zoneEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    That’s not hard to find. Let me help you out.

    https://huggingface.co/bartowski/Qwen_Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF

    On the second thing, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Speech to text and text to speech is really efficient on CPU. In fact, I am dictating this directly into the CPU with a microphone using the program I’m about to share with you below. It works perfectly fine and is instantaneous. You might like to try it because we’re both running on the same CPU.

    https://handy.computer/

    https://github.com/cjpais/handy

    I recommend Parakeet V2 by the way.

    I’m not sure how you are thinking of using TTS. If you switch over to something like Open Web UI as your front end, you can have various plugins for that sort of thing.