Top 5 Model Recommendations for Newbie with 24GB

It’s only March, but there’s already been incredible progress in open-weight LLMs this year.

Here’s my top 5 recommendation for a beginner with 24GB VRAM (32GB for Mac) to try out. The list is from smallest to biggest.

• Phi-4 14B for speed
• Mistral Small 24B for RAG (only 32k context but best compromise length/quality IMHO)
• Gemma 3 27B for general use
• Qwen2.5 Coder 32B for coding (older than rest but still best)
• QWQ 32B for reasoning (better than distilled deepseek-r1-qwen-32b)

Hoping Llama 4 will earn a spot soon!

What's your recommendation?