Budget PC LLM Test: LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct Wins for General Use

A developer tested five small LLMs (under 2 billion parameters) on a standard office PC without a dedicated GPU to determine which models perform best on budget hardware. The tests focused on token-per-second speed and the quality of creative writing, specifically generating funny cat stories. LFM2.5-350M was the fastest, ideal for quick tasks, while LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct offered the best balance of quality and performance for general use on CPU-only systems. AI

IMPACT Identifies viable LLM options for users with limited hardware, expanding accessibility for AI tasks.

RANK_REASON The cluster details an independent evaluation of multiple LLMs on specific hardware, akin to a benchmark study. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on dev.to — LLM tag →

• DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B
• Gemma-3-1B-Uncensored
• LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct
• LFM2.5-350M
• Qwen3 0.6B

• product
• infra

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →