Supercharging my RTX 3060 with the Solar 10.7B Local Large Language Model

Title: Supercharging My RTX 3060 with the Solar 10.7B Local Large Language Model
Release date: September 17, 2025
Produced by: Djere Services Group
Homepage: https://djere.com/

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**PRO TIP: NotebookLM sometimes pronounces technical words incorrectly making it hard to understand what it's saying. Opening the associated article and following along as it speaks helps A LOT.**

Associated article: https://djere.com/supercharging-my-rt...

Executive Summary
At Djere Services Group, we love all aspects of technology, especially those related to Free Software and open-source. I was recently pleasantly surprised to discover an open-source large language model that was completely new to me: Solar.

In this article, I document my successful effort to significantly boost the performance of my mid-range Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics card for running local Large Language Models (LLMs) without a hardware upgrade. Initially using 8-billion-parameter models, I sought a more powerful solution but was constrained by my card's 12GB VRAM limit, which caused "out of memory" errors when I attempted to run larger 14B models. My objective was to find a "sweet spot" model that offered a substantial increase in capability while operating comfortably within my hardware's memory budget.

The ideal solution was found in SOLAR 10.7B, an efficient and powerful open-source model from the South Korean AI startup Upstage. This model is notable for its innovative creation through a "Depth Up-Scaling" technique, which allowed it to be developed from a Mistral-7B base. This efficient method resulted in a model that consistently outperforms larger competitors, establishing it as a top performer on public leaderboards. Its FOSS nature and superior performance-to-size ratio made it an ideal candidate for my project.

Upon implementation, the SOLAR 10.7B model proved to be a transformative upgrade. It delivered responses with incredible speed and a dramatic improvement in factual accuracy compared to the previous 8B models. A test query about jazz musician Charlie Parker, which previously yielded erroneous information, produced a comprehensive, well-structured, and entirely accurate biography. The model's modest 6.2 GB VRAM footprint makes it a perfect match for the 12GB RTX 3060, leaving ample memory for long conversational contexts. I conclude that SOLAR 10.7B acts as a powerful software-based supercharger for mid-range GPUs, proving that intelligent model design can provide a greater performance leap than simply increasing parameter size.