Looking for Windows users with 2–8 GB GPUs to test a low-VRAM local LLM runtime

Community Calls
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been developing a Windows local-LLM application called StreamAI, specifically focused on running useful language models on systems with limited GPU memory.

My development machine is deliberately modest:

AMD Radeon RX 570 — 4 GB VRAM
32 GB system RAM

On that system, the current beta has qualified two modes:

Fast mode
Qwen2.5 1.5B Instruct
About 1.1 tokens/sec

Quality mode
Qwen1.5 7B Chat
About 0.45 tokens/sec

The goal of the project is not to compete with high-end GPUs. I’m trying to determine how useful local LLM inference can remain on older or limited-VRAM Windows hardware.

StreamAI uses a memory-bounded CPU/GPU streaming approach so that model execution does not depend on keeping the entire working model resident in GPU memory.

I have reached the point where testing only on my own RX 570 is no longer useful. I am looking for a small number of Windows testers with different hardware.

I am especially interested in:

  • AMD GPUs with 2–8 GB VRAM
  • older Radeon cards
  • NVIDIA GPUs with 2–8 GB VRAM
  • Intel Arc or Intel integrated graphics
  • laptops with limited or shared GPU memory
  • machines that normally struggle with local LLM runtimes

I would initially like to test on roughly 6–10 different machines rather than distribute the beta widely.

The beta includes an automated hardware and inference qualification process. After testing, it creates a small results ZIP that the tester can inspect and manually send back to me.

There is no automatic telemetry or automatic uploading of results.

The beta is currently a compiled Windows application and uses a short-lived machine-bound tester license while I keep the test group controlled.

If you are interested, please reply with:

GPU / VRAM / System RAM / Windows version

For example:

GTX 1650 / 4 GB / 16 GB RAM / Windows 11

I am interested in failures just as much as successes. My goal is to eventually publish the hardware results, performance measurements, and practical limits so the information is useful to other people working with constrained hardware.

The main question I am trying to answer is:

How low can the hardware requirements go before local LLM inference stops being genuinely usable?

If there is interest, I’ll share the results from the different machines here as the testing progresses

3

Hi ottale. I could run that test on a laptop on Monday:
RTX 3050 laptop / 4GB / 16GB RAM / Windows 11 Pro.

I have an older PC that I could try to get working this weekend:
RTX 1050 / 2GB / 16GB RAM / windows 11 pro. (Ready)

Let me know if these are helpful, and I’ll start researching how to revive the old PC this afternoon. No rush, though. If I don’t have time, you’ll only be able to use the first one for your test on Monday, and the other one sometime during the week.

Good luck with your project.

4

Hi Logos-Adri, thank you — both systems would be very helpful.

The RTX 3050 laptop with 4 GB VRAM is especially useful because my current qualified development machine is an AMD RX 570 with 4 GB as I had mentioned, so this would give me an important NVIDIA comparison.

I would also definitely like to test the older 2 GB system. In fact, machines near the lower hardware limit are particularly useful. If it doesn’t work, that result is still valuable because part of the testing is determining where the practical hardware boundary is. Just one clarification: you listed “RTX 1050.” Did you mean a GTX 1050? There is no rush to revive the older PC. The RTX 3050 test on Monday would already be very useful.

I’ll send you the controlled Windows tester kit along with the SHA-256 checksum and instructions. The software does not automatically upload telemetry or results. After testing it creates a results ZIP that you can inspect before sending it back to me.

The beta uses a temporary machine-bound test license. After installation, the application will generate a machine-license request. Send that request back to me and I’ll generate the temporary tester license for that machine.

I have the controlled beta tester kit ready. For security, I’d prefer to share it through a restricted Google Drive link rather than post the executable publicly. If you’re comfortable doing so, please send me the email address you’d like me to grant access to. I’ll use it only to provide access to the beta file if your ok with that.

Thank you for helping with this, it’s muched appreciated.