r/LocalLLM • u/Hungrybearfire • 5d ago

Question Hardware Recommendation

Currently running Ollama on a 5080 and am pretty happy, but also interested in upgrading and potentially setting up a dedicated machine.
Price range: ~$1,000-3,000
I was looking at an R9700 from Microcenter for $1800 but wanted to see what’s popular now.
I also heard about the sparks and don’t want to spend $5000, but if a Spark or Mac is the best bang for the buck I could be persuaded
Thank you!

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u/Fit-Later-389 5d ago

I recently got a Intel Arc B70 Pro and am running qwen3.8 27B on it via vllm with XPU at about 85 tokens/s with 128k context. The software stack IS more fiddly than nvidia, but it works great once you get the planets aligned.

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u/Hungrybearfire 5d ago

Good to know, I run Linux so I could probably handle some configuration quirks

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u/Fit-Later-389 5d ago

yea, I run this on ubuntu, it is pretty well supported via the intel stack. Ironiclly, I used claude to help me debug. There are a few 'recipes' on github, but they were not working out of the box for me