2x RTX3090 are around $4400. Without any electricity costs or other parts, that's 3.6 years of $100/m claude.
When I bought, I paid $850 a piece. And I needed one anyways for the gaming I was going to do.
My guess is the next good time to buy is going to be 24-36 months from now, depending on how the AI bubble goes.
---
I'll add to this, I personally don't like Apple hardware (not so much related to the hardware as their company philosophy) but their machines with unified memory (or AMDs latest unified memory offerings) get pretty equivalent speeds to my 3090s, and are probably a much better modern entrypoint to local llms.
There's a reason the joke is that Silicon Valley software devs bought up all the Mac minis for OpenClaw.
You can get a 48gb unified RAM M4 pro mac mini for ~2k. If you're not going to do much else with the machine, it's what I'd pick as my budget inference device right now. Spend a year of claude now, get ~150tok/s for the next decade (plus) for ~free.
If you want more capable and are willing to spend a little more, go with the newer Ryzen AI Max+ 395 machines.
You'll spend less on power too.
My last suggestion would be to go buy an RTX3090 at this point. You can do a lot better for a lot cheaper.
Also, 2 gens old means bad performance at ray tracing, abysmal path tracing if at all. Pretty sure it can't run smoothly CP2077 in native 4k without dlss upscalers with all on ultra.
If you set the target resolution to 1080p, not much changes in the render pipeline except the that final upscaling step. To get better quality, the lower resolution is bumped up so there is more data to work with for the upsampling, but the scaling performance can be very hit or miss depending on the game as the engine itself often can play a huge role in rendering performance.
As far as rendering the 1080p image at 4k, yea it works fine, but there will always be little artefacts that remain for those looking for them. 1440p seems to be the sweet spot for gamers today, but 4k is really nice for when you're not gaming as most online video is now made for dual use on televisions.
We should own things, not rent them. We should all do what we can to keep the fabled 2030 agenda at bay.
How do AMD cards perform with LLMs? A 9070 is sold for ~$600 and has 16GB VRAM
16 GiB won't fit you much, so you'd probably want at least 2x, and preferably 3x of those, and then you need a motherboard, power, etc. that can handle that.
In a quickly moving field, it's amazing how much money one can save by overcoming FOMO and not living on the bleeding edge. It's like waiting for Steam sales, the games will be just as good.
I have a 5080 too! For me, the key has been dropping Ollama for Llama.cpp, which is not particularly scary to configure anymore and just skyrocketed performance. I download the models with LM Studio, then run them with llama.cpp.
Not anymore.