vram

6 articles · newest first

AI

should you build a local-AI rig in 2026? my honest answer is 'probably not' — with one big exception

this is the question I get more than any other, and my answer disappoints people. the hardware is genuinely capable now. the maths usually still doesn't work — unless one specific thing is true for you.

Lena Fischer · 14h ago · 9 min

Hardware

a $1,999 mini-PC runs a 120-billion AI model at home. ask it to run a 70B and it chokes

the Framework Desktop and its Ryzen AI Max+ 395 twins hand you ~96GB of GPU memory for two grand — enough to load models no single consumer GPU can touch. whether they actually run fast comes down to one word: bandwidth.

Ravi Malhotra · 2d ago · 7 min

AI

everyone asks which local AI model is 'best.' wrong question — your VRAM already picked it

Llama 4 Scout, Qwen3.6-27B, GPT-OSS-20B, Phi-4-14B — four totally different 'best' models, and which one is yours comes down to a single number: how much VRAM your GPU actually has.

Lena Fischer · 2d ago · 6 min

AI

China just dropped an AI model that beats Claude. good luck running it — 8 GPUs isn't even close

Moonshot's new open-weight model is the biggest ever made, and it's genuinely good. it's also flat-out impossible to run at home — and the reason why is a lesson in how GPUs actually work.

Lena Fischer · 2d ago · 5 min

Hardware

Nvidia literally finished the 24GB RTX 50 Super — then shelved it over a $50 chip. you can't make this up

the cards are done. they're sitting at board partners right now. what's stopping them from shipping? a single memory chip that costs about $50 more than the one it replaces.

Ravi Malhotra · 2d ago · 4 min

Gaming

Valve wants $1,049 for the Steam Machine. let's talk about what that money actually buys

it's 6× the price of a Steam Deck, you had to win a lottery to even buy one, and it packs 8GB of VRAM in the worst year ever for memory prices. so is it worth it? let's actually break it down.

Diego Santos · 2d ago · 6 min