I put together a linux box with a 2080ti a few years ago and have been using it consistently for personal ml research ever since. Ive found it well worth the investment and learned that the ease with which I can jump into hacking on a project is key, which is why this works so well for me. I can just ssh in at any time and start experimenting with models. Even if its not technically economical when you do the math, the ease, reliability and fact that I know my models arent being billed per hour helps encourage me to experiment often, which is kwy to learning.

As for software, I do everything with jax and tensorboard for viewing experiments. Jax is a phenomenal library for personal ml learning as its extremely flexible and has relatively low level composable abstractions.