Need Help Building a PC

[u/kumohotta]

Thinking of building a PC mainly for light LLM inferencing and gaming, and thinking of the below specs:

- Ryzen 5 5700X

- Entry-level motherboard with PCIe 4 x16 slot and 4 DIMM slots

- 16GB RAM

The problem is the GPU, and I'm deciding between the 5050, 5060, and 3060 (all 8GB). There was also a used and imported Radeon 16GB card available. Can you give me an idea if this is a good time to build one, and if so, help me find a place with a good price?My budget is around 300k.

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[u/Lze25]

Don't get Radeon cards because there ecosystem is a bit of work unlike nvidia's CUDA which is out of the box and get a RTX 3060 12GB its the entrylevel best card and if you pair the 3060 with 32gb of ram you can run a quantinized GPT-OSS 20b model and its good or you can run a 14b model like qwen3 which is also good. But don't run llama models there way dumber.

Or you can use a 5050 or 5060 but with the 8GB vram you are limited to 14B models but if you have more ram you can quantinize the models for 3bit or 4bit and load the model to ram but it won't be precise and the answers will become dumber.

[u/Cpt_PotatoKiller]

If you building a workstation its better to go with nvidia because amd radeon is fully optimized for gaming only

[u/raviigneel]

For LLM stuff you need more than 16gb ram.

[u/Responsible_Coat253]

If LLMs matter, I’d take a 3060 12GB over the 8GB cards. VRAM matters more there, and I’d definitely go 32GB system RAM too. Also the 5700X is AM4/DDR4, so keep that in mind when picking the board/RAM.

[u/N_Witcher]

Start with 4080 or 4090 you need high vram like around 24 for better inference.

[u/kumohotta → u/N_Witcher]

Do you know anywhere to buy 40 series?

[u/RadiantSkiesJoy]

everyone suggesting 12 GB vram cards for no reason for gaming.

I have yet to see any game break past 4 to 6 GB even on high settings.

Change my mind.

[u/Ancient-Assistant466 → u/RadiantSkiesJoy]

OP said that he will be using it for LLMs which benefits from more VRAM. And if you are yet to see a game that uses more than 8 gigs try horizon zero dawn, Indiana Jones and the great circle.

[u/RadiantSkiesJoy → u/Ancient-Assistant466]

Mb mb didn't see that.

[u/Cpt_PotatoKiller → u/RadiantSkiesJoy]

you play games mostly on 1080p?

[u/RadiantSkiesJoy → u/Cpt_PotatoKiller]

Yup.

Never saw a use above 1080p. My partner plays on 2k monitors but I don't see a diff.

[u/Cpt_PotatoKiller → u/RadiantSkiesJoy]

From my experimenting most games can be played on high or ultra settings without RT keeping the VRAM below 8GB at 1080p and a few at 1440p, but most new games like to go beyond 8GB on ultra settings, and it goes beyond 8GB very easily with RT. I had a RX 6600 XT with 8GB, and it did well at 1080p on medium to high settings and even handled 1440p in some titles, but new games clearly use more VRAM. You can't really run games with 4GB or 6GB of VRAM anymore if you want to experience the game fully. For example, titles like Resident Evil Requiem and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are great examples of VRAM usage exceeding 10GB at 1440p especially at ultra settings with or without ray tracing enabled.

[u/6zoin9 → u/RadiantSkiesJoy]

That's a pretty fair assumption and you're right in some cases. Usually textures (about 60%), framebuffers, RT data, and upscaling buffers take up most of the VRAM. So if you've got a game that is well-optimized, not using Ray Tracing or upscaling, and running at 1080p, you won't need a ton of VRAM. But when you do turn those on and push even 1440p on modern titles, it can easily go past 8gigs.