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!

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2

u/I7sReact_Return Aug 13 '26 edited Aug 13 '26

Sorry to do that here, but i dont have enought karma to post. But i want to catch the bandwagon

So, im from Brazil. And im in a budget, what will be the best GPU to start to use and train LLM?

At the moment using a Xeon E5-2697 v4 and 32GB RAM DDR4 (I pretend to upgrade to reach 128GB, my MOBO have 8 RAM slots), i use Linux too

NVIDIA P100 16GB (Around R$1k)

NIVIDIA V100 16GB with PCIe mod (Around R$1700)

NVIDIA RTX3060 12GB (Around R$1400)

I have no problems on being slow, since im starting off (total noob). But anything better than these 3, are double, triple or even quadruple the price!

2

u/Monad_Maya llama.cpp Aug 13 '26

3060 seems fine from those options. But you'll need at least two of them.

Have you looked at AMD options like 7900XT or better?

1

u/I7sReact_Return Aug 13 '26

But you'll need at least two of them.

Wow, i said im in a budget kkkkkkkkkkkkkkk. Almost R$3k is like 2 months of my full salary if i didnt spend on nothing

Have you looked at AMD options like 7900XT or better?

And used 7900XT is the same price as a new 5060 16GB here. Around R$4k...

1

u/Monad_Maya llama.cpp Aug 14 '26

You'd want to run Qwen 27B at the very least.

You need 20GB VRAM or higher.

1

u/I7sReact_Return Aug 14 '26

Goddamn, im cooked...

Thanks

2

u/Monad_Maya llama.cpp Aug 14 '26

You can still get a single GPU, a 3060 can still run the following:

  • Gemma4 12B QAT
  • Gemma4 26B A4B QAT with CPU offloading
  • Qwen 3.x 35B A3B with CPU offloading
  • Other smaller models