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2026

  • in Findings
  • 22 min read

I know you run LLMs. Will it boot?

Cartoon in a boxing ring: the author, in an orange apron, holds a measuring tape up to a giant muscular robot made of glowing network layers and servers, while a small worried graphics card in red boxing gloves looks up at it. A crowd cheers and cameras flash.

I know you run models. A new one comes out, everyone on your timeline is running it, and you rent an H100 to try. Forty minutes later you still do not know whether it fits on that card, and if it does, with what flags.

So I ran them: fourteen of the open models people run this month, from one RTX 4090 to eight H200s, and I kept every boot and every failure, so you do not have to rent a GPU to find out.

This post is what I learned, and the tool that did it: Apron, an open-source tool that answers "will it fit, will it boot, will it answer" before you rent the GPU, then checks its own answer on a real one and keeps both. It is also about what I got wrong along the way, and how I found out.