CPU & RAM Local LLM

So I’m curious to hear everyone’s thoughts on this and have a question or two as well. I have a 2019 iMac that’s basically a home server these days. Apart from NAS it also runs heaps of scheduled scripts and folder watcher scripts via Automator but I’ve recently started experimenting with local LLMs called from the Python scripts. I’ve played around with local LLMs on my main desktop with a RX9070 but didn’t really get much done other than testing. I have 96GB of RAM in the iMac using an i5-8500 and it won’t use the GPU for local LLMs which is fine with only a 4GB VRAM. I’ve installed qwen3.5:35b-a3b-q8 and now starting to improve some of the scripts that used OCR to run through the local LLM after OCR to improve accuracy for handwritten scanned documents. Despite the slow processing im very impressed for overnight document processing but I’m ready to see what else can be done, what’s everyone using large slow LLMs for? Instead of fast GPU LLMs? And has anyone made the iMac do any GPU work via Ollama? I’m still using openAI for agentic work as required but keeping the usage low now I’ve got the iMac running this way. submitted by /u/Stuffandthat12 [link] [comments]

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Source: r/ollama | 2026-10-22