Local LLM / Benchmarks

Lab Notes: 67% LiveCodeBench-30 on a $1,400 rig

20/30 = 67% LiveCodeBench-30 on a $1,400 mini-PC. Wilson 95% CI 49-81%. Easy 10/10, medium 8/10, hard 2/10. n=30 public subset. Not the card.

2026-08-204 minLiveCodeBench Qwen3.8-27B Q4_K_XL Strix Halo

By Simon Gonzalez de Cruz (follow the build in public on X @KyaniteLabs_). 2026-08-20. Canon: FACTS-PACK.

The number first: 20/30 = 67% LiveCodeBench-30, best-per-problem across labeled arms, on a $1,400 GMKtec EVO-X2. Wilson 95% CI [49%, 81%]. Always cite the interval. n=30 is small; the interval is the honest number.

Split: easy 10/10, medium 8/10, hard 2/10. Champion: Qwen3.8-27B UD-Q4_K_XL, K+V q4_0, temp 0, livecodebench v6 public cases only, stratified 10/10/10, seed 20260820.

A single-config cell (2048 tokens, thinking off) landed 13/30, with a reproduction at 14/30 and 25/30 per-problem agreement. That is a ±2-problem noise floor at temp 0. Do not treat one run as exact.

Thinking: on the 15 problems where no-thinking produced no code at 4096 tokens, thinking (budget 2048) rescued 5. Hard items leak prose that starves the code. On HumanEval-30, thinking bought nothing (28/30 identical). Citable line: reasoning pays exactly where tasks are hard, nothing where they are easy.

This is not the official full-set LiveCodeBench card. Different instrument: we ran a 30-problem public subset at Q4 on this box. Band-check only, and say so.

Contamination caveat: v6 problems (~May 2025) predate the model. If anything the number is inflated versus a clean window. The hard-split finding is the conservative-safe part.

Raw: results/lcb-30-2026-08-20.

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