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Hardware

Local LLM Shootout on a Mini PC

We tested Llama 3.1, Qwen 2.5, and Mistral on a sub-$400 mini PC to find the best local coding assistant.

local LLMmini PCOllamaLlamaQwenMistralbenchmarks

Local LLM Shootout on a Mini PC

Hardware: Beelink SER5 Pro, Ryzen 7 5800H, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB NVMe (no dGPU) Software: Ollama 0.5.x, Ubuntu 24.04 Models tested: Llama 3.1 8B, Qwen 2.5 7B Coder, Mistral 7B Instruct

What we tested

  • Code completion on a 300-line Python module
  • Instruction following for a small React component
  • Context recall over an 8K-token prompt

Observations

  • Qwen 2.5 Coder produced the cleanest code and best instruction adherence at 7B.
  • Llama 3.1 was fastest on this CPU but occasionally skipped type hints.
  • Mistral handled longer contexts better, making it useful for repo-wide questions.

Verdict

For cheap local coding on CPU-only hardware, Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B is the best balance of speed and quality. Pair it with Continue for a private Copilot-like experience.