hardware sizer
What hardware do you actually need?
Pick a model size and a target tokens-per-second. We'll show which hosts hit the spec, which fall short, and the cheapest one that comfortably handles your workload.
cheapest host that meets your spec
€749 capex · 16 W under load · 28 tok/s on a 7B model
| Host | Capex | RAM | tok/s | watts | verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac Mini M4 16 GB | €749 | 16 GB | 28 | 16 | ✓ meets target |
| Single-GPU box (RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB) | €1180 | 32 GB | 92 | 91 | ✓ meets target |
| Raspberry Pi 5 8 GB | €138 | 8 GB | 4.2 | 11 | below target |
| Intel NUC 13 i7 | €620 | 32 GB | 11 | 28 | below target |
Methodology
Throughput numbers come from our 21-day benchmark across four hosts. See the full benchmark article for context, methodology, and the long tail of edge cases. Numbers assume Q4_K_M quantisation; FP16 will be ~2× slower with ~4× the RAM.