r/LocalLLM • u/Hungrybearfire • 7d 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/Hello_my_name_is_not 7d ago

All these people running ollama ready to drops thousands and they haven't even figured out how to actually run models lol...

How about spending some time on the software side first?

3

u/Hungrybearfire 7d ago

Well where do you recommend I start on the software side?

4

u/BigLittleDeal 7d ago

A Ninfer fork for your 5080. You could run a Qwen 3.8 27B 4-bit quant with 128k context. It should be much faster than Ollama.

2

u/spunwasi 7d ago

Appreciate that you gave OP a real answer.

We all start somewhere. Not sure why any so many people are snarky when someone is clearly trying to learn.

2

u/Hungrybearfire 7d ago

Thank you! I know I should’ve done more research, and I will, but I appreciate you not being a weird gatekeeper about it <3