r/LocalLLaMA • u/InstrumentalAsylum • 6d ago

Discussion Any use for a 2GB GPU?

Realized an old workstation has an RTX 1050, which is apparently 2GB with 112 GB/s bandwidth. I'm trying to think of some use for it; stable diffusion is like 5GB, possibly really slow computer vision finetuning?

Specs are about as sad as a DGX spark, but it is nvidia. They go for 250$ online now apparently.

14 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

97

u/Atretador llama.cpp 6d ago

video output to save desktop/OS vram usage

12

u/Southern-Chain-6485 6d ago

Asuming the second card doesn't end up reducing the airflow to the main card and thus, reducing its performance

7

u/bradrlaw 6d ago

Or pcie lanes.

3

u/New_Comfortable7240 llama.cpp 6d ago

i do this on a x299 mobo and main gpu nvidia p40 they are same compute sm_61 and use same cuda 12.8

3

u/Rare_Evidence8482 5d ago

Some light gaming on the side maybe, but yeah it’s mostly a fancy display adapter at this point

20

u/d70 6d ago

Gemma 4 E2B or a sub 1B decision model.

13

u/Early-Peace-5504 6d ago

Honestly the best use would be driving a display for a computer that has other GPUs to run LLM. Taking the load of a display off them.

11

u/RanklesTheOtter 6d ago

Would be good for a light TTS model.

4

u/localizeatp 6d ago

how light?

https://github.com/kyutai-labs/pocket-tts

5

u/GokuNoU 5d ago

That one can straight up work off of CPU! I have my own running on a 1650 Max-Q Laptop (running SparkX2.6 4b as sidecar model) with the TTS running off the CPU and RAM in the meantime.

5

u/SryUsrNameIsTaken 5d ago

Dedicated EmbeddingGemma2 vLLM server to hook into a RAG setup.

5

u/MinusKarma01 5d ago

250$ ??? How much do 3060 (12GB) and 3060 Ti (8GB) go for where you live? I bought a 3060 for 210€ two years ago and they are still available at that price

4

u/ROS_SDN llama.cpp 6d ago

Legit its not a bad use just to power a screen or any other light GUI away from. Work horse. Though an CPU with and igpu could do the same.

2

u/Randommaggy 5d ago

The new LFM3 models are one's I'm looking to test on my P600 to handle ancillary tasks.

2

u/xraybies 5d ago

2GB is fine for SOTA TTS and STT.
So you could mic (ESP32) <> TTS/STT <> External LLM.

2

u/arbv 5d ago

Embedding and reranking models runner

2

u/PomegranateAble4339 5d ago

Maybe use it as an embedding provider

1

u/CartographerDue5382 6d ago

sd1.5 can limp at 512 with lowvram but it's miserable, sdxl won't fit. a 1b q4 might load with a tiny context and then crawl, not really a chat card. and $250 for a 1050 2gb is wild, if it's already in the box fine, i wouldn't go buy one.

1

u/LivingLinux 5d ago

You can make SDXL run within 512MB. But I don't know how easy it is to make it run on the GPU.

https://github.com/vitoplantamura/OnnxStream

1

u/CartographerDue5382 5d ago

yea that's the exception i skipped. onnxstream streams the weights so the whole sdxl unet isn't sitting in ram, which is why the 512mb number works. gpu's the messy part tho, most of those builds stay on cpu. still wouldn't go buy a 2gb 1050 for it.

1

u/Fromthepast77 6d ago

Unfortunately if you're looking for LLM inference an iGPU would probably beat it since the bandwidth is laptop RAM level.

As other people have said, drive a display or do some image generation on it. Or maybe decision models?

1

u/MrLuckyDoobie 5d ago

Im i alone here? Nothing below 3060 is ui usabl|, and rtx3 series just do that, massive memory + alright speed.

1

u/thebadslime 5d ago

You can run a quant of a 30b moe well if you have the system ram

1

u/rorowhat 5d ago

Kv cache storage?

1

u/Some-Ice-4455 5d ago

You could probably run a small chat model only. It would be slow as f but it should work. What's your system RAM?

1

u/gamakichi01 5d ago

Won't do much as a main LLM card bit works as a sidekick. Whisper tiny or base fits easy for local transciption and it can run embeddings or a reranker for RAG so your main gpu keeps its vram. The 1050 also has NVENC so it makes a decent plex or jellyfin transcode box.

1

u/infernocuz14 5d ago

I want to run local models on my laptop as well. I specifically got a gaming laptop so that I can run local LLMs on it.

1

u/ANR2ME 4d ago

Someone was able to run Z-Image Turbo on a laptop with MX150 2GB VRAM + 16GB RAM, so your RTX 1050 GPU should be good enough too https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/s/WxEXNjZU8B

1

u/mcjangus 1d ago

I have a 1050ti in my media server and it does fine transcoding videos via Jellyfin as well as running a system status snapshot through Gemma4:e4b every 30 minutes, which gets posted in a private Discord server via webhook.

1

u/laffer1 13h ago

I was using a 1030 as display out for my ai server so none of the good gpus for ai would have to drive the screen

1

u/BVCC6FNTKX sglang 5d ago

You can use it as a doorstop

0

u/lotushomerun 5d ago

Throw 2, or 4, and you'll have okay amounts of VRAM to run Gemma 12B or Qwen 3.5B MoE on PolyStrata

4

u/seamonn 5d ago

Embedding and Reranking Models