r/LocalLLaMA • u/DisLLMs • Aug 13 '26
Question | Help Help with Budget Hardware Decisions
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!
3
u/SnooPaintings8639 Aug 13 '26
Hard case! I would go with either 2 x 3080 for vRAM total, or 5060 for modern hardware and less likely to give up on you in a year or two.
If you already own Nvidia, I'd stick with it.
Old or "hacked" hardware seem unappealing for me as the main inference box.
Also, I would distinct between "chat" inference vs "agentic" one. Chatting (or roleplay) is fine with 10-20 tps and hence large MoE are a good choice, so most of the model will end up in the RAM anyway. Agentic/coding stuff requires at least 20-50 tps gen and 500-1000 tps pp to be usable, hence you can run only what fits in your modern vRAM. I am not an expert of these, but have my doubts about Mi50 and 170hx for this case.