40 articles · newest first
Liquid AI's new LFM2.5-2.6B beats models four times its size at tool-calling and runs entirely on-device — down to a Raspberry Pi. Here's what that actually means before you cancel your GPU shopping.
Lena Fischer · 2d ago · 8 min
A Hong Kong shop is doubling old RTX 2080 Ti cards to 22GB of VRAM and selling them on eBay for about $500. I ran the actual math on whether that's a steal or a trap.
Ravi Malhotra · 2d ago · 8 min
Luna dropped from $6 to $1.20 per million output tokens overnight. this is what an actual price war looks like.
Lena Fischer · 4d ago · 6 min
a limited-time Newegg bundle drops the effective price of a 16GB RX 9070 XT to $659 — here's whether that's actually a good local-AI buy
Nadia Rahman · 5d ago · 5 min
MI50s and P40s are cheap because they were built for server racks, not your desk, and the gap between cheap and working is where most people give up
Ravi Malhotra · 5d ago · 6 min
the model that made headlines for being nearly free to rent turns out to be one of the most expensive things you could try to self-host
Lena Fischer · 5d ago · 6 min
The AMD Instinct MI50 32GB sells used for $120-250 with more VRAM and bandwidth than most 2026 consumer cards. AMD just made owning one a lot riskier.
Ravi Malhotra · 5d ago · 7 min
Arc B580, RX 9060 XT 16GB, and RTX 5060 Ti 16GB are all fighting for the same budget local-AI buyer in 2026. Real prices and real bandwidth numbers settle it.
Ravi Malhotra · 5d ago · 6 min
GDDR7 modules and TSMC wafer costs just pushed every RTX 50 card higher this week — but the ugliest number isn't the one everyone's quoting.
Ravi Malhotra · 5d 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 · 5d 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 · 5d ago · 8 min
24GB of old VRAM versus 16GB of new, low-power silicon — I ran the real math on what each one costs, up front and over a year.
Ravi Malhotra · 6d ago · 6 min
Phi-4 Mini, Gemma 3, and Llama 3.2 all claim to fit — I checked which one actually leaves room to breathe.
Lena Fischer · 6d ago · 6 min
Same 16GB of VRAM, wildly different price and software maturity in August 2026 — I ran the actual numbers.
Ravi Malhotra · 6d ago · 6 min
Apple's own memory shortage just raised Mac Studio prices and gutted its top RAM tier — here's whether it's still worth buying over a GPU PC for running models at home.
Lena Fischer · 6d ago · 8 min
A third price hike in one year is reportedly coming for the RTX 50 series — and if you're buying VRAM for local AI, not frame rates, the calculation isn't the same as 'wait for a sale.'
Ravi Malhotra · 6d ago · 7 min
A developer wall-calibrated an Apple Silicon power meter against a smart plug and found the real number: fractions of a cent per million tokens.
Lena Fischer · Aug 3 · 6 min
Tom's Hardware ran the numbers on three very different local-AI machines, and the Mac won on raw speed almost across the board — just not by the margin its spec sheet promised.
Ravi Malhotra · Aug 2 · 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
A used Tesla V100 and a $50 adapter got one builder to 32GB of VRAM for $266 total — here's the honest math on whether you should copy them.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 31 · 7 min
DeepSeek's reasoning models are free and open — but the full one needs a datacenter. The good news: the distilled versions run great on a normal PC. Here's how to run DeepSeek locally, and which size fits your hardware.
Lena Fischer · Jul 30 · 9 min
They're the two most popular ways to run AI models on your own computer, and both are free. The short answer: LM Studio if you want a friendly app, Ollama if you want to build. Here's the full comparison.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 30 · 9 min
Open, free AI models have gotten shockingly good. Here are the best ones to run locally — for every size of computer, from a laptop to a 24GB graphics card.
Lena Fischer · Jul 30 · 9 min
You don't need a subscription or an account to have a capable AI assistant. Free, open models running on your own PC give you private, offline, unlimited AI — here's how to set one up.
Lena Fischer · Jul 30 · 9 min
Running your own AI model at home sounds technical. It isn't — you can be chatting with a private, offline AI in about five minutes with one free app. Here's exactly how.
Lena Fischer · Jul 30 · 9 min
Gemma 3 comes in sizes from tiny to 27B, and each has a very different hardware requirement. Here's exactly what you need to run each one — and which fits the card you already have.
Lena Fischer · Jul 30 · 9 min
Gaming laptops have fast GPUs, but they cap out at 16GB of VRAM. A MacBook Pro's unified memory goes to 128GB. For running AI models on the go, memory wins.
Lena Fischer · Jul 30 · 9 min
To run a 70-billion-parameter model at home you need ~48GB of VRAM. Here's the build that gets you there — and why two cheaper cards beat one expensive one.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 30 · 9 min
You don't need a $3,000 rig to run real local AI. For about a grand you can build a machine that runs 7B models fast and 14B models comfortably. Here's the exact parts list.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 30 · 9 min
Everyone talks about the GPU price, but a local AI rig has a running cost too. It's smaller than you fear — but if you're in Europe, it's not nothing. Here's the real math.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 28 · 9 min
A dual-GPU rig to run Llama 70B costs $2,000+. But you can rent an A100 that holds it for around a dollar an hour. For anything but constant use, the cloud wins big.
Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 min
Everyone frames it as cloud vs local like it's a religion. It's just arithmetic: how many hours will you actually use it? Here's the number that decides it for you.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 28 · 9 min
Both are excellent open coding models that run on a single card. But they're tuned differently, and the right one depends on how you code. Here's the honest comparison.
Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 min
8GB is the entry floor for local AI, and plenty of capable models run on it if you pick the right size and quantization. Here's what actually works, and the trap to avoid.
Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 min
Both run local models silently and efficiently, but the gap between them for AI isn't the chip — it's the memory bandwidth and how much you can buy. Here's which Mac Mini to get.
Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 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
Everyone obsesses over VRAM, but system RAM matters too — especially the moment you try to run a model bigger than your GPU. Here's the real number for every kind of local-AI setup.
Lena Fischer · 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
They all run local models, but they're built for completely different people. One's for easy desktop use, one's for flexibility, one's for serving at scale. Here's how to pick without wasting a weekend.
Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 min