Three questions, three answers.
Local AI gets confusing fast. This page exists so you don't have to read 50 spec sheets before you can act. Pick the question that matches what you're actually asking, get a real answer.
Pick your hardware and a model, get a verdict in seconds. Honest about what fits, what's tight, and what doesn't.
Every catalog hardware unit ranked by RunLocalAI Score. Measured tok/s where we have it, extrapolated honestly where we don't.
Tell us your budget, OS, target models, and what you care about. We rank GPUs by fit with reasoning — no fake tok/s numbers.
Three setups we'd actually recommend.
Not exhaustive. Opinionated. Each path is a real hardware + software bundle we publish — not a marketing wrapper. Pick one, follow the linked stack page, you're running local AI in under an hour.
The cheapest sane way to run useful local AI in 2026. A used 3060 12GB pairs with Ollama + Open WebUI for chat, code completion, and a small RAG setup. You won't run 70B, but Phi-4 14B at Q4 holds its own for daily work.
Price figures are our planning estimates (launch MSRP, or a used-market estimate for older cards), not live prices. Check the current price before you buy.
Affiliate and referral links: we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Prices and stock change, so check the listing. How we make money.
The sweet spot for most readers. Snappy 14B chat, a coding agent that doesn't feel laggy, and headroom for vision models; 32B runs with part of the model on the CPU, slower. Apple Silicon is a parallel sweet-spot if portability matters more than ecosystem breadth — see the Apple Silicon stack for that route (an M3 Max with 36GB sits in a higher price band).
Price figures are our planning estimates (launch MSRP, or a used-market estimate for older cards), not live prices. Check the current price before you buy.
Affiliate and referral links: we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Prices and stock change, so check the listing. How we make money.
The most VRAM per dollar in a setup we recommend. Two used 3090s give you 48GB across two cards; the runtime splits a 70B Q4 model between them (the memory does not pool into one device). Plan for a power supply and case sized for two high-power cards; the stack page has the details.
Not sure this tier is enough? Rent the same GPU for an evening and run your exact model first.
Price figures are our planning estimates (launch MSRP, or a used-market estimate for older cards), not live prices. Check the current price before you buy.
Affiliate and referral links: we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Prices and stock change, so check the listing. How we make money.
Run the model you care about on a rented GPU for an evening before you buy any of these setups. If it does not fit or feels slow on the rented card, the same class of card will not do better at home.
Referral links: RunLocalAI may earn a commission or account credits if you sign up and rent, at no extra cost to you. Hourly rates and which GPUs are listed change all the time, so check the provider's page before you start. How we make money.
Prefer it assembled?
For the Balanced path: Velocity Micro's ProMagix HD60, HD80 and HD150 configurators did not list the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER on 20 Oct 2026. The nearest card they listed is the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti (16 GB), in the ProMagix HD60, if you would rather buy a configured desktop than build it yourself. The used-card paths have no prebuilt equivalent.
Velocity Micro builds configure-to-order desktops and workstations in the US. Compare the configured total, the power supply, cooling and warranty with buying the parts yourself before you order.
Configure a ProMagix HD60Affiliate link: RunLocalAI may earn a commission if you buy, at no extra cost to you. We have not tested a Velocity Micro system, and this is not a benchmark endorsement. How we make money.
Want the math?
Upfront + electricity vs cloud API. Every assumption visible.
Annual landscape report — hardware, models, runtimes, agentic.
AutoGen, CrewAI, LangGraph, Hermes models — the agent ecosystem.
How we estimate tok/s and what counts as "measured."
Head-to-head matchups for common buyer choices.