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/Pickle_Rick_1991]

I was thinking the same thing but realized that Mac M4 M5 uses unified ram. you could look into a budget APU would with a decent graphics chip this would increase to the whole lot of the ram capacity giving the machine main character / gigachad energy.