16 articles · newest first
Owners with decade-old GTX cards still running fine say the real lifespan number isn't what upgrade-cycle marketing wants you to believe.
Ravi Malhotra · 3d ago · 6 min
The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the CPU every gaming build guide wants you to buy right now. If you're building for local AI too, here's where that money should actually go instead.
Ravi Malhotra · 6d ago · 7 min
South Korea is the canary. TSMC wafer costs and $20 memory chips just pushed the RTX 5090 to 2.5x its sticker price — here's the actual buy-or-skip math for running AI models at home.
Ravi Malhotra · 6d ago · 8 min
It launched at $249 promising a fresh budget option. A few months later, a used RTX 3070 for about the same money makes it a hard sell.
Ravi Malhotra · Aug 3 · 6 min
Instinct MI400 and Helios racks got the headlines at Advancing AI 2026 — but the actual local-AI hardware for individuals already exists, and it's cheaper than an RTX 5090.
Lena Fischer · Aug 1 · 7 min
It's slow, it's old, and it has more VRAM than cards costing twice as much. For a first local-AI GPU, the humble 3060 12GB is still the smart-money entry point.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 28 · 9 min
On paper, 12GB for $249 is the best VRAM-per-dollar in new cards. In practice, Intel's software stack is the catch. Here's the honest verdict for local AI.
Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 min
It's the value middle of the Blackwell lineup: 16GB of fast GDDR7, NVFP4 support, and enough speed to run the 14B tier comfortably without paying 5090 money. Is it the right local-AI card for you?
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 28 · 9 min
Qwen3-32B at Q4 needs about 20GB of VRAM, which rules out every 16GB card and makes this a simple question: what's the cheapest 24GB GPU that runs it well? The answer is used.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 28 · 9 min
Llama 70B needs about 40GB of VRAM to run well — and almost no single consumer card has it. Here's what actually works, visualized, with the measured speeds and real costs for each path.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 23 · 10 min
Every 'best budget GPU' list is a spec dump. This is a decision: three cards under $500, what each can actually run, and the one number — VRAM — that tells you which to buy without reading a benchmark.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 22 · 9 min
Blackwell versus the old flagship, and for once the newer card loses. The 5080's 16GB caps what you can run; the 4090's 24GB doesn't. For local models, capacity beats the spec sheet — with the measured numbers to prove it.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 22 · 9 min
The RX 7900 XTX gives you 24GB cheaper than a 3090. The catch isn't what you've heard — a llama.cpp scoreboard and an open bug report suggest its Vulkan backend beats ROCm for inference, no painful install required.
Lena Fischer · Jul 22 · 9 min
A new RTX 5060 Ti 16GB looks like the safe budget pick. But 16GB can't load the 32B models a used 3090 runs at 30 tokens/sec — and in local AI, the card that opens the file wins before speed matters.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 22 · 9 min
Measured at 102.7 tokens/sec — double a 3090 — with the only 32GB of VRAM in consumer land. Then the street price doubles the MSRP and the whole verdict flips. Both answers, with the math.
Lena Fischer · Jul 22 · 9 min
Measured llama.cpp numbers say the 4090 wins every speed test and costs twice as much — while energy per generated token is a dead heat. Here's who each card is actually for.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 22 · 9 min