> I'm just a layman and I liked how a small version of deepseek ran faster and with less power draw on my PC than other small version models did.

This doesn't sound accurate. There are no "small versions" of deepseek r1. They released some distilled fine-tunes of their big model. They took qwen2.5 models as a starting point, and fine-tuned them with ~800k generations made with deepseek r1. But they did not change any of the model's architecture, so the "base" model released by qwen and the fine-tuned one released by deepseek should run identically on your hardware.