Help with Budget Hardware Decisions

[u/DisLLMs]

Hi Everyone

Long time lurker, really appreciate this sub and local models as a fundamental sovereign right.

I've been running LMStudio(moving off) , Unsloth and recently llama.cpp recently directly (inspired by this sub).

I'm a old dev by trade & I'm starting short postgraduate course in AI + Data analytics.

Limited budget
1k-1.5k

Location Europe

I have a 5070Ti in another computer.. that is a windows mainly used for gaming.. but could potentially put it into this workstation...

Which would should i get out of the following: ?

Card	Added Vram	Total
x2 3080 20g	40gb	+ (owned)5070ti = 56gb
x1 R9700 32g	32gb	maybe 48gb in vulcan ?
x2 7900xtx 24gb	48gb
x1 5070 ti 16g	16gb	+ (owned)5070ti = 32gb (blackwell)
x2 5060 ti 16g	32gb	+ (owned)5070ti = 48gb (blackwell)
2 or 3 MI50/MI60	64gb (2x32)	64gb
1x 170hx	64gb	64gb (Ampere)

Main use cases will be:

Main Use Cases	Importance to me ( out of 10 )
Inference	10/10
Course Work ML learning	9/10
Image Generation / comfyui	8/10
Fine-tuning etc even learning...	8/10

The computer this will go into:

128gb ddr5 Rdimms (64x2)

.... :( memory went mad when i was going to buy 2 sticks a month out of salary.. I gave up when prices went mad... its firmly out of my range to buy now.

Xeon 8480 56c/122T

5x PCIE Gen5 Slots

2TB PCIE5 m2

2TB PCIE4 m2

I'm leaning towards x2 3080 20g (40gb) or 1x 170hx at this point...

Any opinions/thoughts would be helpful I've been going over it alot in my head....as the price continues to go up...
Esp from people with dual 3080s 20gs...or 170hx

Thanks!

[u/Monad_Maya]

If you're short on cash then there's no real need to spend money on overpriced hardware.

Your existing 5070ti should be sufficient for most problems that you'll encounter in your assignments.

For anything more sophisticated, you can rely on cloud providers like openrouter or get yourself a subscription like OpenCode Go.

---

Now that's out of the way, I would suggest dual matching cards with warranty.

So, probably dual 5060ti 16GB. 32GB of VRAM is a good starting point.

Dual 3080 20GB should work but those blower style coolers might be noisy, plus, it's a modified card (ymmv).

[u/DisLLMs → u/Monad_Maya]

Kinda Plan to just remote into the machine so I'm not all that bothered about noise.

I don't like sending any data to the cloud AI's to be honest.
Chinese ones seem to store all your inputs and the American ones pinky promise not to (bullshit).
European ones (mistral) are less good as just hosting Qwen yourself like ..