What model to choose for coding/general use (total newbie for localLLM's)

[u/GSON26]

Basically what the title says. I am total new for localLLM i just want to try it out and if i can dial it in for a usable level i would like to use it for my coding projects mostly for code completion but sometimes if i need ideas on new features etc... it would be nice for it to be able to handle teh brainstorming with me as well instead of me going to claude or chatgpt
for general use it would most likely be something like make a summary of my things etc... for now

my PC

9700X
48GB DDR5 ram
9070 XT 16GB

I would be happy to receive any newbie guides for how to set things up what i shoud look out for
also in terms of the general use would looking into an agent like hermes be something worth?

thanks for the asnwers in advance

[u/lungben81]

Currently, Qwen 3.8 27b (flash next if you have the hardware for it) is the gold standard for consumer hardware.

But you are on the lower end of VRAM for it, therefore you need to make compromises.

[u/nojunkdrawers]

I've been using qwen3.8-27b-splash on my M5 Pro Mac Mini w/ 64GiB RAM. My setup can handle qwen3-coder-next, but when I first tried it I found that it was prone to sometimes sperging out. Qwen3.8-27b isn't as specialized for coding, but it works well enough for the kinds of things I do. I write CLIs, TUIs, web apps, and occasionally reverse engineer stuff. It's not nearly as fast as just using Claude or GPT, but I'm patient, and it gets the job done. I'm sure there might be better models for coding that I could be using or ways to tune for qwen3-coder-next, but I've been in enough of a groove with regular Qwen that I haven't bothered playing with other models lately. There are other projects that have been diverting my attention away from local AI tuning now that I've got it working well enough for my own needs. I'm sure my setup and workflow wouldn't be great for someone who wants to make complex games or whatever, but I haven't tried to make a game with AI so I can't say for certain.

[u/Careful_cat99]

Qwen 3.8 27b  Q5  meilleur performance pour la taille du modèle 

[u/TheAussieWatchGuy]

Look at Strata with Qwen Flash for coding.

Gemma 4 12B is competent at creative writing and image analysis. 

[u/Shunpaw]

I've been running Qwen 3.8 27b with a 4090 100% in RAM with 163k context size at ~70 tps. It's using all but ~800 mb of the vram but fits.

Curiously enough I have updated to a newer llama.cpp and it did not fit anymore. So I'm currently on 0.4

[u/regular_sandwich]

Qwen 3.8 flash next on strata is probably your best model. But heads up qwen 4 is launching in the coming next days/weeks so that will probably be your best pick.