I've been kicking this around in my head for a while. If I want to run LLMs locally, a decent GPU is really the only important thing. At that point, the question becomes, roughly, what is the cheapest computer to tack on the side of the GPU? Of course, that assumes that everything does in fact work; unlike OP I am barely in a position to understand eg. BAR problems, let alone try to fix them, so what I actually did was build a cheap-ish x86 box with a half-decent GPU and called it a day:) But it still is stuck in my brain: there must be a more efficient way to do this, especially if all you need is just enough computer to shuffle data to and from the GPU and serve that over a network connection.