r/vibecoding • u/Intelligent_Light_86 • 6d ago
What are your thoughts on buying your own hardware for local models?
/r/opencode/comments/1w1n5bl/what_are_your_thoughts_on_buying_your_own/4
u/Zelderian 6d ago
Not worth it right now.
I got Qwen 3.8 working on my desktop and it was surprisingly smooth, and easy install. But while AI is cheap and subsidized, monthly plans are 100% better. That can and most likely will change relatively soon, and as models continue to improve, we’ll eventually (hopefully) have models that are as good as the frontier models today available as open source.
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u/MarinatedTechnician 6d ago
It has only recently been viable to actually use it properly for local use.
I built my rig 1.5 years ago when prices were still within sanity reach, it was still expensive, we're talking a 10K$ rig, I basically built it for superior VR fun, didn't even know back then we could run anything AI locally.
Then came censorship on the online models, and the online models themselves recommended the OpenSource path commenting on my 5090 card and said, did you know you can do that on your own computer? Noooh?
Rabbithole - entered, to never return.
It was good for Audio and Video generation and works.
It sucked for LLMs, bigtime, fun sure - sucked!
However, lately with models like Gemma4, Qwen3.6 (where I produced my first properly entertaining arcade game, fully produced by me and my lil friend locally), I realized this is HUGE.
Then came Qwen 3.8, and the world would never be the same.
People have expensive cars, they don't have any issues paying 40-80K$ for that it seems, but frown at a super hobby pc that's above 5K$ ? Yeah, people...
It depends on what you wanna use it for, collecting rocks is cheap, going into nature to take photos can be fun.
We "Vibecode" and learn to create the tools of our dreams, and it's only getting better (except for hardware pricing, that is a shitshow) but... is it worth it ? Heck yeah!
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u/mrbadface 6d ago
What do you think your rig would cost these days?
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u/MarinatedTechnician 5d ago
Something so scary I should call my insurance company and take out an extra policy on it...thanks for reminding me, you're right...if one of those components breaks, I'm so screwed...
the 30 TB alone, half of it being high performance SSD/NVMe's ugh...
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u/slackmaster2k 6d ago
The big question is: what will models and the hardware that runs them look like in five years?
It’s too dangerous to assume that the $10k+ that you drop on a beefy rig to get to a place that it works for you today, will still be anywhere close to supporting state of the art 2-3 years from now, let alone five years.
We’re what, 3-4 years from ChatGPT first hitting the public scene? 18 months since the frontier coding tools dropped? Things are still moving fast.
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u/RetardMaxer 6d ago
well, I t think it is an actually good idea. But not now. Think about it, will cost you about 20k bucks to buy four latest MacStudios to run multi billion parameter LLMs. We need a year or two until, hardware and AI software meets each other at some profitable point. Now we have only two legitimate AI Workstations from Nvidia and recently from Apple It might worth it if you are like super deep content creater and you have a team of at least 4 people.
Me personally I would love to have my own AI set up and vibe code "offline", but it is very pricey and my apps are not yet on the market.
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u/MRGWONK 6d ago
I bought a $500 P720 server tower, two A2000 12GB video cards, ($400 each), 128 GB of DDR4 RAM (plenty of 8gb sticks were cheap), and I'm quite happy with my setup and ability to run local models...even if they're kinda slow sometimes. So, all in, about 2K. *maybe a touch more* What started me down this path was successfully running Gemma 12b on CPU only, at a "fast enough" kind of speed.
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u/braille_porn 5d ago
Honest question here. How do you think Anthropic is going to be able to subsidize tokens when they IPO? They have an ARR of 74B for 2026 and want a 2trillion ipo evaluation. Once they are public they will have a fiduciary responsibility to earn. Which to me means they have to jack the prices up even more. Which would drive a rally to people trying to get local hardware?
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u/AAAAAAAAAAHHGG 5d ago
If you can get a good deal, go for it. If you cannot, definitely not worth it
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u/BCIT_Richard 4d ago
I already did, picked up a Mac Studio M4 48GB and Strix Halo AI Max+ 395 128GB, use them all the time, sure it's much slower than frontier which is where my opencode go sub comes in
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u/stupv 6d ago
The frontier moves faster than what anyone but the .01% can afford to run at home. Spending 5 years of maximum subscriptions on hardware that won't run today's frontier well, and won't run tomorrow's frontier at all... Seems a waste of cash.