Hardware picks
Hardware for local AI
Components selected to run LLMs at home. Links go to Amazon, AliExpress and eBay — these are affiliate links that may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.
Specs and availability are indicative. Always check compatibility with your build (power supply, case, chipset) before buying.
GPU
NVIDIA RTX 5090 32GB
GPU
Most powerful card for local LLMs, 32GB GDDR7, great for quantized 70B.
- 32 GB GDDR7
- 21,760 CUDA cores
- FP4/FP8
- 575W TDP
NVIDIA RTX 4090 24GB
GPU
Best perf/price to run 30-70B models under quantization.
- 24 GB GDDR6X
- 16,384 CUDA cores
- 450W TDP
- DLSS 3
RTX 4060 Ti 32GB
GPU
Affordable VRAM to start with 13-30B quantized models.
- 32 GB GDDR6
- 128-bit bus
- 165W TDP
- PCIe 4.0
RAM
64 GB DDR5 5600 (2×32)
RAM
Comfortable baseline for inference and light fine-tuning.
- 64 GB (2×32)
- DDR5-5600
- CL36
- 1.25V
SSD-NVMe
SSD NVMe 4 TB Gen4
SSD-NVMe
Critical speed to load model weights fast (7 GB/s).
- 4 TB
- PCIe Gen4
- 7000 MB/s read
- M.2 2280
SSD-SATA
CPU
AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
CPU
16 cores for data prep and CPU fallback inference.
- 16 cores / 32 threads
- Zen 5
- 5.7 GHz boost
- 170W
PSU
Workstation
Mac Studio M2 Ultra 192GB
Workstation
Massive unified memory: runs very large LLMs without a dedicated GPU.
- 192 GB unified memory
- 24-core CPU
- 76-core GPU
- 800 GB/s bandwidth