For an ordinary buyer, where does the experience boundary sit when running local AI on a stock Core i7 14700?

  The boundary sits on the light-Q&A side. A 7B quantized model can reside in memory and answer at a relaxed pace; 20 cores/28 threads tidy up embedding and RAG chores, and 5.4GHz boost with VNNI keeps single prompts from dragging. Step the model up and push long-context generation continuously, and the shortfalls surface quickly.

  For most people's first local-AI machine it is a natural start: get Ollama serving a 7B, stand up the RAG library, and learn the workflow before spending more. If your long-term plan is living on large models, the money flows toward VRAM and RAM, not a pricier CPU — this chip has already driven that road to its end.