Stuck with 16 GB RAM and no GPU / GPU's VRAM for 1700 bucks? The iGPU isn't the 12-core Xe3 either.
If this wasn't 1700, I wouldn't write this:
Running AI locally:For running 4-bit quant of SoTA, in its class size, AI LLM model Qwen3.6-35B-A3B[1], even 32 GB RAM would be quite limited:
Quote from: reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sq94qx/is_anyone_getting_real_coding_work_done_with.. I've come to the conclusion that (1) 32768 is the biggest context I can get away with in an adequately smart model, and (2) it just ain't enough.
More about running AI models locally: notebookchat.com/index.php?topic=315954.0 ("Your own ChatGPT, offline: AI without the cloud on your laptop") and comments.
[1] artificialanalysis.ai/models/open-source?models=qwen3-8-27b%2Cmuse-glimmer%2Cqwen3-6-35b-a3b%2Cgemma-4-31b%2Cgemma-4-26b-a4b (the dense 27B model is better, but it's much slower) (you can look up other models, or non-reasoning scores, in the table, too)
In this memory sense, any upgradable RAM + 8 GB VRAM gaming laptop is superior.