No matter what computer you have, there's a model that will run on it. GPU comparison table, budget builds from $0-$2500, CPU-only guide, Mac/AMD/Intel support, and RAM/VRAM calculator.
02 — Hardware Guide: What Do You Actually Need?
The Most Important Thing to Know
VRAM is the bottleneck, not compute.
A model running on a 5-year-old RTX 3060 at Q4 quantization gives you 96% of the quality of the same model on an A100 — just slower. And "slower" for most use cases (chat, coding, document analysis) still means 20-40 tokens per second, which is faster than most people read.
The Quick Decision Tree
AMD launches $4000 Ryzen AI Halo local AI monster for Windows 11 with 128GB RAM
768GB of cheap Intel Optane DIMM memory sticks used to run 1-trillion-parameter LLM on a system with a single GPU — local Kimi K2.5 install achieved roughly 4 tokens per second
China's Lisuan LX 7G100 gaming GPU tested: RTX 3060-like performance for almost $500
AMD Ryzen AI Max PRO 400 brings support for up to 192GB RAM (plus smaller CPU, GPU, and NPU speed boosts) - Liliputing
Vulkan Support: LLMs for Everyone | Tabby AI coding assistant
AMD may be preparing the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, offering 7800X3D-like gaming for less
AMD’s Next Big Chip Hopes To Beat Nvidia’s CPUs While They’re in the Crib
AMD launches $3,999 Ryzen AI Halo PC to compete with Nvidia DGX Spark
