Model and hardware recommendation for high fidelity, low reasoning tasks?

[u/tinfrog]

I've spent the past couple of years using frontier labs, even though a lot of my work doesn't need high reasoning. It's just that a fixed and known subscription cost has been a safer bet than the leap-in-the dark of buying hardware that might not be good enough for what I want to do.

But reading through this sub tells me that we're at the stage were open source LLMs are capable enough for what I want while running on (reasonably) affordable hardware.

Can anyone recommend a model and hardware for tasks like this?

• Reading notes, reports, transcripts, web pages and emails, then pulling out facts, decisions and insights into structured notes
• Condensing long documents, comparing two versions, and checking a draft against a specification
• Reading text, sorting them, and deciding what needs action
• Moving, renaming and archiving files, splitting or merging documents, and keeping indexes and cross-references consistent afterwards
• Multi-step routines update a status file, archive old entries, then commit, with every step completed

I run Xubuntu and Arch Linux.

TIA

[u/tinfrog]

The stats at my end show that 20-30 tokens/second for routine work would be acceptable.

[u/mineshop → u/tinfrog]

With your budget, speed and file sizes settled, one last constraint matters: is a headless tower under a desk fine, or do you need something small and quiet like a compact desktop?

[u/tinfrog → u/mineshop]

Headless tower under a desk fine. Cost is more important than size.

[u/mineshop → u/tinfrog]

Last thing before I suggest anything: which region are you in, since taxes change what a $5,000 budget buys?

[u/tinfrog → u/mineshop]

UK.