Shoutout to the guy on r/LocalLLaMA who said to check my GPU's power limit before blaming the model
I was about to give up on running a 7B model on my old 3060 because the output kept coming out garbled, and I figured the card just couldn't handle it. Turned out my power limit was set way too low from some old mining profile I forgot about, and bumping it back to 100% in Afterburner fixed it in about ten seconds. The output went from random noise to clean answers right away, and I felt a little dumb for spending two evenings reinstalling drivers. Anyone else find a setting like that which made you question your whole troubleshooting process?