Small Local LLMs with Internet Access: My Findings on Low-VRAM Hardware

Hey everyone, I've been experimenting with local LLMs lately and wanted to share some observations from my time running small models on limited hardware (RX 5700XT with 8GB VRAM, 16GB system RAM). Here's what I've found so far. First, giving small models internet access through MCP or RAG makes them significantly usable. Models in the 3-9B parameter range can learn concepts on the fly by reading from the web instead of relying entirely on larger offline models. My Qwen 3.5 4B with 180k token context handled complex tasks well without needing massive.