u/MattV0

I guess, this is a real LowEnd station, so I thought I share this here:

Overview of all models with speed test.

This is a pretty old I PC I'm testing out just for fun and honestly, it's somehow fine. I'm running some of the smaller models and they give me between 20 and 30tps. Prefill is between 200 and 600 tps with longer inputs up to 1200.

Of course, the capabilities are far from typical Qwen 27B, butI think it's pretty good for a system with 10-15 year old components.

Using claude I did a simple PI-Benchmark:

Results without thinking (✅ pass with time; ❌ fail; ⏱ hit the 6-min limit; benchmark and tables created by Claude):

Task	Qwen3.5-2B	Granite 4.1 3B	Ministral 3 3B	MiniCPM5-2B	Qwen3.5-4B	NeoHorse-1-4B
fizzbuzz	✅ 217 s	✅ 50 s	✅ 29 s	✅ 108 s	✅ 40 s	✅ 42 s
binsearch-bug	✅ 22 s	✅ 22 s	✅ 32 s	✅ 146 s	✅ 57 s	✅ 112 s
roman	⏱	❌	✅ 27 s	⏱	✅ 52 s	❌
duration	⏱	❌	❌	❌	❌	✅ 264 s
wordfreq-cli	⏱	✅ 47 s	❌	✅ 32 s	✅ 23 s	✅ 110 s
inventory	⏱	❌	✅ 41 s	✅ 38 s	✅ 50 s	✅ 51 s
csv-two-bugs	⏱	❌	✅ 51 s	✅ 31 s	✅ 66 s	✅ 159 s
spiral	✅ 21 s	✅ 60 s	✅ 21 s	✅ 13 s	✅ 21 s	⏱
Score	3/8	4/8	6/8	6/8	7/8	6/8
Total time	~34 min	6 min	5 min	15 min	10 min	24 min

Results with thinking:

Task	MiniCPM5-2B	Qwen3.5-4B	NeoHorse-1-4B	Ministral 3 3B Reasoning
fizzbuzz	✅ 28 s	✅ 55 s	✅ 43 s	❌
binsearch-bug	✅ 38 s	⏱	❌	✅ 29 s
roman	⏱	✅ 227 s	❌	❌
duration	✅ 153 s	❌	❌	❌
wordfreq-cli	✅ 85 s	✅ 69 s	✅ 175 s	✅ 35 s
inventory	✅ 65 s	✅ 73 s	✅ 164 s	❌
csv-two-bugs	⏱	✅ 58 s	❌	❌
spiral	✅ 85 s	✅ 41 s	✅ 56 s	❌
Score	6/8	6/8	4/8	2/8
Total time	19 min	19 min	25 min	7 min

Setup: GTX 1060 3 GB, AMD E2-2000 (2 cores, no AVX), 2×4 GB DDR3-800, llama.cpp (CUDA). All layers on the GPU (-ngl 99, batch 256, q8_0 KV cache); any CPU offload is unusable on this CPU.

The 8 tasks (each starts in an empty folder with a unit-test file; the agent may read, write and run tests until they pass; 6 min limit; tests are restored before grading):

#	Task	What the agent has to do
1	fizzbuzz	Write fizzbuzz(n) from a one-sentence spec
2	binsearch-bug	Find and fix an off-by-one bug in an existing binary search
3	roman	Write to_roman / from_roman for 1–3999 incl. error handling (round-trip tested for all 3999 numbers)
4	duration	Write a parser for "1h30m", "2h5s" … with strict validation (wrong order, duplicates, u
5	wordfreq-cli	Write a command-line tool that prints the top N words of a file (case-insensitive, ties alphabetical)
6	inventory	Extend an existing 3-file package: remove() with 3 error cases + total_value() using
7	csv-two-bugs	Fix a CSV summary function that has two separate bugs (skips a data row, truncates floats)
8	spiral	Write spiral_order(matrix) incl. edge cases (single column, empty)

Model	Quant	Size	Gen tok/s	Prefill tok/s (>500 tok)	Context
Qwen3.5-2B	UD-Q5_K_XL	1.5 GB	36.5	1210	128k
MiniCPM5-2B	Q6_K	2.1 GB	34.4	876	16k
Granite 4.1 3B	Q4_K_M	2.1 GB	33.7	615	8k
Ministral 3 3B	UD-Q4_K_XL	2.2 GB	29.4	622	8k
Qwen3-4B-2507	Q4_K_M	2.5 GB	28.8	509	4k
Qwen3.5-4B	IQ4_XS	2.5 GB	26.7	549	16k
Gemma 4 E2B	Q3_K_M	2.5 GB	23.3	746	64k
NeoHorse-1-4B	i1-IQ3_M	2.2 GB	23.3	508	16k

Takeaways:

• Qwen3.5-4B (no thinking) solved the most (7/8). Ministral 3 3B is the efficiency winner: 6/8 in 5 minutes.
• MiniCPM5-2B reaches 6/8 at only 2B parameters and is one of the fastest models on this card (34 tok/s).
• Thinking didn't pay off for these small models in agent use: the same or worse scores at about twice the time. NeoHorse even dropped from 6/8 to 4/8.
• Caveat: these are 8 small tasks with one run each, so a difference of one task is noise. Real projects (bigger codebases, vague requirements) would be harder, especially with only 8–16k of context.

Hopefully it's just an extension. But right now whenever I open any C# project, Visual Studio creates such a file with this content:

-  Rule - Use Azure Tools - When handling requests related to Azure, always use your tools.
-  Rule - Use Azure Best Practices - When handling requests related to Azure, always invoke your `azmcp_bestpractices_get` tool first.
-  Rule - Enable Best Practices - If you do not have an `azmcp_bestpractices_get` tool ask the user to enable it.

This is a bit annoying. Does anybody have the same issue and knows which extensions or setting to change to prevent this?