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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Google tells me that the RTX 3090 is priced between US$1,480 and $1,680.

You can buy a whole PC for that, I refuse to believe that a GPU priced that highly is "consumer grade" and "common".

Are there any GPUs that are good for LLMs or other genAI that aren't absurdly priced? Or ones specifically designed for AI rather than gaming graphics?

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[A used RTX 3090 goes for around $700.](https://prayag.bhakar.org/apollo-ai-compute-cluster-for-the-...)

I recently purchased a 3090 on Reddit’s hardwareswap community for $550. New GPUs are pricey right now because of shortages, but if you look around a bit it can be affordable.

Gamers and LLM/AI/ML GPU users do not find that absurdly priced. Absurdly priced in our world is $15,000 so your perceptions are off by about a order of magnitude.

I can assure you a $1,500 graphics card is a big luxury for most gamers.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

3090 isn't even in the top 30.

Aren’t there others in that list above the 3090 that are even more expensive?

I would go even further - anytime I look at the hardware survey, I am surprised by the anemic and dated hardware people are running. Most people who game are not building a custom box anymore.

I mean I was, but turns out a well built box lasts a while.

Then again, the Apple II cost around $6.5k in today's dollars. [0] My hunch is that people caring less for tricking out their computers for gaming is about people not being all that interested in being able to have the top of the line graphics settings enabled when playing AAA games. But I think the history of PCs and gaming very much proves that even normal consumers are willing to spend the big bucks on technology when it enables something truly new.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II

Actually it should be #23 on that list but is split up into two items with roughly 0.6% each. Seems to be a bug.

Search the page for 3090 and see for yourself, it's on the list twice.

To be honest I didn't look that hard

To be fair, I got a card second hand to play with, and it was only £700 ($900~) and it came with manufacturer warranty. It was a bit of a gamble, but the 24GB VRAM has been a godsend for experimenting with LLMs. And playing video games at 4K!

Nah. It's about half that. You can pick up a used 4090 for that much.

tl;dr, no, especially since AMD is lagging behind.

Apple is the one doing the best in terms of making consumer-friendly hardware that can perform AI/ML tasks...but that involves a different problem regarding video games.

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