Depends what your interests are! I can get around 35ish tok/s TG at - c 48,000 of Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B (Q4_K_M) using polystrata on a similar rig (you've got an A1000, I have a T1000).

Which means absolutely nothing to you right now but suffice to say - Polystrata + Qwen 35B is something to try. It's among the "smartest" you can run on your rig.

Personally, for every day use, I like Ling 3.0 Tiny at Q6 or SharpMiniCPM5-2B at Q8. They are stupidly fast, and supported by MCP tools and a bridge I wrote, work as excellent "hey, I'm thinking of X. Can you tell me about it? And what about Y and Z?" or "How does this read?".

I pull out my phone, send them a text message and they text me back.

Think of it like a Google in your pocket, except off line (unless you tell it to go online). Which technically I suppose makes it agentic lol.

(I can show you some examples if you'd like. I keep a set list of 8 tasks I use for benchmarking as I tweak things, as well as some off the wall / out of band queries)

Being that Ling or CPM only take up a sliver of the GPU, I can run them concurrently with other models (like an image generator, text to speech, vision etc) to create a really useful offline house brain, that can roam across my local documents, offline wikipedia (Kiwix) and the like.

It's the combination of things that results in a 1+1=3

Having said that, my AI ladder is

• 90% Ling or minicpm5
• 9% Qwen 3.6-35B
• 1% GLM5.3 Flash via open router.. which costs fractions of a cent for what I need (there are tricks to this but it's probably out of scope to info dump it on you at this stage).

For now, I keep a $20 ChatGPT Plus (separate pools for chat and Codex have been so good) but I am ditching that asap, with the changes coming this month.

HTH. Write back if you need anything else. It's nice to see someone else rocking an A1000 / T1000. Your rig should be significantly faster than mine... which is why the A1000 is still stupidly expensive for a 50W card.

EDIT: just saw you said "CPU is i7-12700". With that RAM, that CPU and that GPU, I'd guess you'll hit 50-60 tok /s with Qwen 3.6-35B using polystrata once you get the GPU / CPU split right.

In other words, congrats and go fuck yourself :) You have a very nice little inference box. And yes, it can do your calendar alerts thing.