Almost every guide I came across suggested the same thing: if you want to run a local LLM, you need a dedicated GPU. I already had a self-hosted AI setup running smoothly on my machine with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070, so I knew what a good local LLM experience looked like. That got me wondering how much of that experience could be replicated on a laptop with only integrated graphics. Instead of relying on benchmarks or online opinions, I decided to test it myself using the same model and everyday tasks I normally use AI for. The results were far better than I had expected.