> it seemed to me that the bottleneck mostly revolved around the layers that were in system ram and that a lack of vram was really the gating factor in terms of reasonable inference performance. (although i would imagine that there's probably some more optimization that could be done to make best use of a split vram/sysram setup.)

You could try a model that fits entirely into in VRAM. It"s a trade of precision for a decent bit of performance. 16GB is plenty to work with as i've seen acceptable enough results with 7B models on my 8GB GPU.