2x RTX3090 are around $4400. Without any electricity costs or other parts, that's 3.6 years of $100/m claude.

Assuming the $100/m claude subscription is still around in three years.

That's also years of top tier PC gaming, if you're into that.

Yes, today is not a great time to purchase hardware.

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.

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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.

Or a really excellent experience playing Satisfactory with the settings cranked up, which is priceless.

Christ GPU prices have gotten crazy

How do AMD cards perform with LLMs? A 9070 is sold for ~$600 and has 16GB VRAM

You can get 60tps with three 1080tis and the sparse model, and I bet two 16gb 5060tis would do the same for ~1200. One 3090 is enough for a useful system, even on an old am4 host.

In 3.6 years, chances are they are still worth $3k. Unless some new chip fab pops up that can spam the chip market. Even if the AI bubble bursts, I doubt we'll see high-RAM GPUs sell off.

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