gpu-buying-guide

13 articles · newest first

Deals

GPU deals are basically dead this month — here's the short list of stuff still worth buying

Every major GPU tracker just posted its worst numbers of the year. I went through the wreckage to find what's still a fair price.

Nadia Rahman · 20h ago · 6 min

Hardware

everyone's ignoring the $300 GPU that almost matches a $900 RTX 5070 — here's the catch

12GB of VRAM for around $300 sounds like the easy answer to Nvidia's price spike. It mostly is — you just have to fight the drivers a little.

Ravi Malhotra · 20h ago · 6 min

Hardware

the RTX 5070 just hit $900. I ran the local-AI math and almost couldn't recommend it

Nvidia's mid-range GPU is up 36% in two months — here's whether it still makes sense for running models at home, or if $900 changes the answer entirely.

Ravi Malhotra · 20h ago · 6 min

Hardware

you're probably retiring your GPU way too early — here's how long they actually last

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 · Aug 7 · 6 min

Hardware

everyone's obsessing over the 9800X3D — for local AI, it's basically a rounding error

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 · Aug 4 · 7 min

Hardware

nvidia's flagship GPU just crossed $5,100 — for local AI, that math doesn't work anymore

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 · Aug 4 · 8 min

Hardware

Nvidia's new RTX 5050 is barely faster than a GPU from 2021 — skip it

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

AI

AMD's big AI event was all about chips you'll never buy. the one you actually can already shipped

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

AI

the RTX 3060 12GB is the cheapest sensible way into local AI — and in 2026 it's still the one I recommend first

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

AI

Intel's $249 Arc B580 has 12GB of VRAM for cheap — but is it actually good for local AI?

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

AI

the RTX 5070 Ti is the 16GB card most local-AI builders should actually buy — here's why

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

AI

the best GPU for running Qwen3-32B locally isn't the fastest one — it's the cheapest with 24GB

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

AI

the honest answer to 'what GPU runs Llama 70B': not the one you were about to buy

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