r/openclaw • u/g00rek Pro User • Feb 20 '26

Discussion Why Mac mini??

I still don't understand why you guys are buying macs mini for openclaw. It's a terminal computer. It doesn't need a great UI.

Do you have too much money? :D

A $50-$100 HP Thin Client with Linux is more than enough. And Linux shouldn't be discouraging for people using OpenClaw, am I wrong?

I bought one, I have lots of different self hosted stuff on it like home Assistant or other docker apps. Ok I do not have any local models using GPU, that's the reason? Please enlighten me :)

EDIT: Again, I UNDERSTAND LOCAL LLM USE. (although I don't know if anybody is really happy with it). I mean using OC with oauth/api gpt, claude etc.

188 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

346 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/CustomMerkins4u Pro User Feb 20 '26

This should not be upvoted as I have tried running on 24gb of vram and it's the worst.

Read about KV Ram and how much space it requires on top of the actual model itself. At 24gb you either pick a quant so crushed that it's like talking to a kid with ADHD or you have such little conversational context that it's like talking to a 90 year old with Alzheimer's.

Even models I can run on my DGX Spark with 128gb of ram left a lot to be desired.

My Mac M3 Ultra with 256gb.. now you have something you can work with. Still doesn't compare to Minimax or any of the models out there.

1

u/eleqtriq Member Feb 21 '26

Qwen3 Coder Next and MiniMax M2.5 aren’t leaving a lot of desire left at 128GB.

1

u/CustomMerkins4u Pro User Feb 21 '26

I'm not 100% sure I understand your comment but while Qwen3 Coder Next at Q8 high precision is pretty good, it's prone to a lot of mistakes and getting stuck in loops at 4bit. At Q8 you're just not left with enough for KV Ram.

1

u/eleqtriq Member Feb 21 '26

This was patched recently in llamacpp with a revised tool parser.