Published May 14, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT Ayush Pande is a PC hardware and gaming writer. When he's not working on a new article, you can find him with his head stuck inside a PC or tinkering with a server operating system. Besides computing, his interests include spending hours in long RPGs, yelling at his friends in co-op games, and practicing guitar. Ever since I jumped headfirst into the local LLM rabbit-hole, I’ve grown fond of revitalizing old PCs by turning them into reliable AI workstations. With the right tweaks, I’ve even managed to run powerful LLMs that can rival their cloud-based counterparts on something as outdated as a 10-year-old rig . That said, most of my hardcore LLM experiments involve full-fledged x86 gaming systems with dedicated graphics cards and excess RAM. That said, a Raspberry Pi 5 can handle up to 4B models without buckling under the extra load, which makes it a surprisingly decent option for hosting embedding models and simple chatbots.…