A used laptop with a messed up screen will work as well.

It is but ddr5 is not cheap

I find 8th gen i5 and i7 laptops under 200 all over eBay. Hard to beat.

I see a ton of i5-8th gen 2-in-1s with dead batteries, but under 100 on ebay

Just look at the processors in the Synology offerings, you didn’t need much to run a bunch of services.

Will do. I think Asus stopped sending fw updates so I’m hoping to get a few more years out of this unit.

I’m running an older Asus router they is listed on the OpenWrt site. Would it be the most affordable option to just install open wrt on this device and manually bring over my current configs?

I run llms using a 780m you’ll be fine. I get pretty close to 10 tokens a second for larger 20B+ models.