GPU Poor - Don't overlook Laguna XS 2.1

As per title. I'm not affiliated with the team behind this model in any way, shape or form.

As a GPU poor myself (8 GB VRAM laptop + 12 GB VRAM desktop), I found Laguna to be very promising on my laptop.

It runs at 30t/s (60k context) and it one-shot my two usual test prompts : "Make a Tetris-like game" and "Make a Sonic the Hedgehog-like game". Both are not as polished as what you could get with Qwen 3.6-3.8 27B (and to be fair, they are quite wonky and barely playable), but considering my hardware, dense 27B isn't even an option.

I found it to perform better than Gemma 4 - 26B-A4B and Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B. Some people reported looping issues with it, so take my words with a grain of salt, but I didn't encounter any.

Hope it will help some of you.

Edit : Corrections