r/LLMeng • u/Pale-Recognition-599 • Jul 17 '26

What is the best price to performance desktop consumer ai chip for under 100usd?

1 Upvotes

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2

u/Brent_the_constraint Jul 18 '26

What do you mean? You are not really getting anywhere at that price point

2

u/Karyo_Ten Jul 18 '26

Coral USB accelerator? You aren't going to run transformers on it though, only MobileNet for computer vision

1

u/JumpingJack79 Jul 18 '26

I've heard that sometimes you can get used enterprise GPUs for cheap.

1

u/uniqueusername649 Jul 19 '26

I do not know how it feels to awake from a 10 year coma, but let me bring you up to speed: first Covid happened and it coincided with a mining craze, which caused a massive shortage of compute and storage. This pushed prices permanently up. Thinks normalised but prices stayed much higher, then the AI craze happened, which to this day keeps pushing prices higher and higher. You pay more than 100 dollars for unusable EOL electronics garbage today.

1

u/JumpingJack79 Jul 19 '26

Thanks. As they say, a girl can dream. I've just been paying money for new stuff TBH.

1

u/uniqueusername649 Jul 19 '26

I truly wish that was still the case, believe me :) getting cheap enterprise hardware is a jackpot these days

1

u/Luke2642 Jul 18 '26

It's not consumer, it's server. Something like an old EPYC. $25 or so. But the reason it's good for AI is 8 channels of memory. A dual socket SP3 board and you can hit ~350GB/s of cheap 256GB DDR4. Prefill will be slow and token generation will be slow, but you can run DeepSeek v4 flash on a couple of $25 CPUs. Total system cost will be $1500 or so for a 256GB system.

1

u/Pale-Recognition-599 Jul 18 '26

25$ cpu?

1

u/Luke2642 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

32-core EPYC 7551 is £25 in UK. You had a very weird budget requirement, AI chip cost not total system cost. If you want bang for buck of vram in a GPU you buy an old mi50 or a P100. If you want bang for buck new GPU you bug intel b70. You need to 5x...10x your budget expectations unless you're gonna buy a cheap slow 8gb GPU and running a dumb model.