Published May 10, 2026, 7:30 AM 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. Back in December 2025, I figured I could stop my Pascal-era GTX 1080 from gathering dust by using it to host LLMs on Ollama. Despite some snags with the drivers, this experiment turned out pretty well, and its utility skyrocketed when I began pairing it with my self-hosted FOSS stack. But having spent the last couple of weeks tinkering with different providers and LLMs, I realized that 8B models weren’t the only ones I could run on my aged gaming companion.…