I started off using gpt-oss-120b on cpu. It uses about 60-65gb of memory or so but my workstation has 128gb of ram. If I had less ram, I would start off with the gpt-oss-20b model and go from there. Look for MoE models as they are more efficient to run.
My old threadripper pro was seeing about 15tps, which was quite acceptable for the background tasks I was running.