With a system limited machine (2017 i5 iMac Cpu only) I am getting very pleasing results with:
Openhermes2-mistral (7B 4bit K_M quant) for general chat, desktop assistant, and some coding assistance - Ollama backend with my own front end U/I and llama-index libraries implementation. Haven’t tried 2.5 but may.
Synatra 7B mistral fine tune (4bit K_M quant) seems to produce longer responses and spicier with same system prompt (same use case as above)
Deepseek-coder 6.7B (4bit quant) as a coding assistant alternative to GPT-3.5 - just trying out in last week or so and building the personalized coding assistant front end u/I for fun
OrcaMini-3B - for chat when I just want something smaller and faster to run on my machine - the 7B quants are about max for the old iMac. But OrcaMini sometimes doesn’t give great stuff for me.
Yes that’s the one from The Bloke. I imagine you could, but try it! I can run it on an old i5 3.4 GHz chip with 8GB RAM and it seems to run as long as I’m not trying to keep a bunch of stuff open and using up RAM. I haven’t really used it a lot so can’t tell fully yet.