33 articles · newest first
The RTX 5060 Ti got hit hardest, the RTX 5080 barely moved, and that flipped the value math. Here's what actually makes sense, card by card, in August 2026.
Lena Fischer · 1d ago · 9 min
The RTX PRO 6000 nearly doubled in eight months. Here's what your money actually buys against every real alternative for running big models at home.
Ravi Malhotra · 1d ago · 8 min
The card was reportedly finished and sitting with board partners — and Nvidia shelved the whole Super lineup anyway.
Ravi Malhotra · 6d ago · 7 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 · Aug 4 · 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 · Aug 4 · 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 · Aug 4 · 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 · Aug 4 · 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 · Aug 4 · 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 · Aug 4 · 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 · Aug 4 · 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 · Aug 4 · 6 min
Same 16GB of VRAM, wildly different price and software maturity in August 2026 — I ran the actual numbers.
Ravi Malhotra · Aug 4 · 6 min
Four real paths to running a 70B-parameter model on your own hardware or by the hour — priced out with actual 2026 numbers.
Lena Fischer · Aug 4 · 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 · Aug 4 · 7 min
The $279 RX 9050 looks like a normal budget GPU launch, until you notice AMD quietly brought back a 64-bit, 4GB memory config nobody's shipped since 2022.
Ravi Malhotra · Aug 1 · 6 min
18GB of VRAM, the same core, hardware reportedly already sitting with board partners — and still no release date. Here's the real reason, and what I'd buy instead this week.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 31 · 6 min
Rockstar hasn't published a single official spec, and the PC version isn't landing anytime soon — here's what the predictions actually say, and why I wouldn't buy a GPU for this specific game yet.
Diego Santos · Jul 31 · 6 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
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
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
The full DeepSeek R1 is a 671-billion-parameter monster that needs a small cluster. But its distilled versions run on a single GPU — and knowing the difference saves you a fortune.
Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 min
OpenAI's open-weight 120B model sounds impossible for consumer hardware. But it's a Mixture-of-Experts model, and that changes the math completely. Here's what it really takes to run it.
Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 min
Image generation is compute-bound and VRAM-hungry in a different way than LLMs. Here's the GPU that actually keeps up with SDXL and Flux, and the cheapest one that still does the job.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 28 · 9 min
A used 3090 is still the best VRAM-per-dollar card for local AI — but many were mining cards, and the memory runs hot. Here's exactly what to check before you hand over the cash.
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
The scary numbers you've seen are for training models from scratch. Fine-tuning an existing Llama 8B on your own data with QLoRA fits a 24GB card, uses ~14GB, and costs under a dollar per run if you rent. Here's the real math.
Lena Fischer · Jul 28 · 9 min
AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 lets you hand up to 96GB of its unified memory to the GPU — enough to run a 70-billion-parameter model on a mini-PC. Here's exactly how much you can allocate, how to do it, and the catch.
Ravi Malhotra · Jul 27 · 9 min
--n-cpu-moe is the setting that lets a modest graphics card punch far above its VRAM. It offloads the parts of a Mixture-of-Experts model you use least to system RAM — and here's exactly how to tune it for your card.
Lena Fischer · Jul 27 · 9 min
The best open coding model in the world needs a datacenter to run. The best coding model you can run on a single 24GB card is a different name entirely — and it's shockingly close for real work.
Lena Fischer · Jul 24 · 9 min
Kimi K3's open weights land July 27. It's genuinely great and genuinely free. It also needs about 1.4TB of memory to load, which means the download is the easy part. Here's the real hardware math — and the far smaller model that gets you most of the way.
Lena Fischer · Jul 23 · 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