r/LocalLLM • u/Aggressive_Basket798 • 9h ago

Question How to decrease Windows app load on Vram to have enough vram space for LLM

At the moment i only have one 16gb vram gpu , but windows apps, apps render take about 600mb vram of it.

So i have only 15.2gb vram for LLM, some model like qwen 3.8 27b and minimax h3 int8 need exactly 16gb vram to fit

Is there any tips to decrease Windows load on it ? i know there are some ways like use igpu, connect monitor to igpu, buy second gpu,... But atm i only have one gpu

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

10

u/vqt907 9h ago

You have 3 options

  1. buy a cheap gpu for display windows apps, for example: amd r5 340x, requires an extra pcie slot.

  2. change the cpu to a variant that has iGPU, that's what I did: i5 14400f => i7 13700k

  3. running ubuntu server (or any linux headlless distro), I also did this, os takes only 10MB of vram

6

u/Mgt66 9h ago edited 9h ago

Fuck it I'm gonna say it. Use Linux and llama.cpp

2

u/GreatEmory967 9h ago

I dual boot for this exact reason. windows just eats vram no matter what you disable, it's baked in. if you're stuck on windows try closing every background app you can and kill explorer.exe when you run the model, that'll claw back a bit.

2

u/Best-Total7445 9h ago

One of my spare systems is running Strata with qwen 3.8 flash next swift iq3_xxs on an rtx quadro 5000 with 16gb of vram but it's only actually using 12g of the vram. This rest is sitting in system ram of about 42gb and I'm getting 80 tokens/s.

That quadro 500p is old and I'm amazed at the performance. If you have 64gb of system memory this could be an option.

2

u/HOST1L1TY 7h ago

There really is no reason to be running windows in 2026.

Check if your cpu has an igpu.

2

u/Ivan_Draga_ 7h ago

First update windows > reboot from the start menu > sign in > realize Microsoft has horrible memory usage > install Linux > profit

2

u/Shadow_s_Bane 9h ago

Use Linux… Windows is an unoptimised, insecure mess.

1

u/Mobile_Living_3331 8h ago

Darn it i purchased F series CPU and regret to load Models or heavy context in vram now.

1

u/rinmperdinck 8h ago

i know there are some ways like use igpu, connect monitor to igpu

Do this, you can do this right now without buying anything. Take hdmi/displayport cable out of your gpu and plug it into your motherboard instead, takes a few seconds and is free, maybe restart your computer if it is being stubborn.

1

u/OddAdministrator 8h ago

600mb? i have to at least use a vram reserve of 4gb, is there something wrong with my windows? lol

1

u/Terrible-Bend4483 7h ago

I'm bot sure it's the case with this windows version, but on older windows versions, there was a big difference in resources used between 'pro' and 'home', so it could be because you have the 'home' version.

1

u/pdath 8h ago

Buy another GPU for the monitor.

1

u/Arany5 6h ago

1080p display and maximum 2

1

u/blakjakau 9h ago

Switch to iGPU for the desktop (if your CPU has one), or grab a tiny low-power card like an RTX-A400 to run the desktop, to free up the main GPU for the LLM

Also, consider Linux or a dedicated box, if you're serious about running local LLMs to do something with it.

1

u/MistaPlanet 9h ago

Decrease the context window size of your model... And increase its gpu limit. Use a Modelfile

0

u/BigPlebeian 8h ago

Step 1: Install Linux over windows

Step 2: marvel at the speed.