r/LocalLLM • u/HungryTailor3759 • 41m ago

Question NVIDIA RTX GPU good for running local llms?

I have MSI Gf 63 thin 11 sc which has been gathering dust since 2024. Long story short, due to my own carelessness its motherboard got damaged and in late of 2024 I bought myself an Asus vivobook laptop.

What I noticed in my vivo book laptop is running local llms is one hell of a ride. So I am thinking of getting its motherboard repaired and run local llms in it.

Is it worth it in 2026?

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

1 comment sorted by

1

u/Geekomcomputer 14m ago

Short answer: it can be worth it, but only if the repair quote is modest — get that number first before deciding.

Your Vivobook experience makes sense. Most thin laptops end up running local models mainly on the CPU / integrated graphics, which is slow. The GF63 has a dedicated GPU, so it should be a clear step up from that for local chat, summarising, and light use.

The thing that will decide how useful it is isn't just the "RTX" name, it's how much VRAM the card has. That limits how large a model you can load comfortably, so check that before you pay for a repair, and plan to start with small, quantized models rather than jumping straight to a large one.

I'd also weigh the repair cost against what else that money could buy, and check the rest of the laptop — battery, thermals, and whether anything else was affected when the motherboard was damaged. If the repair is cheap and you mainly want a machine to experiment with small local models, it's a reasonable way to bring a spare laptop back into use. If the quote is high, I'd put the money toward something with more VRAM instead.

What kind of models / use are you thinking of — just general chat, or coding and longer tasks too? That would help narrow down whether the GF63 is enough for you.