tl;dr: I’m considering building a budget machine for tinkering with LLMs, but I’m not sure if this is a good idea and how to go about it.

For context: I work in a university department. I currently have access to a 2080 Ti on a shared machine, and we’re in the process of acquiring a small server with 2 L40 cards. So for any larger experiments, I will be able to use this shared machine.

However, I think I would like to have my own small machine for tinkering: trying different models and techniques, and just playing around, and preparing larger experiments to be run on the server. My focus is on teaching and education not on state-of-the-art research.

With aiming for a good amount of VRAM, the 4060 Ti 16GB seems to be the most obvious choice; I also like the low power requirements (regarding energy and cooling). But this card seems to have a poor reputation overall. I’m also not sure what currently the sweet spot w.r.t. the the CPU and memory is – I completely lost track of Intel’s and AMD’s generations over the last years.

Some additional comment regarding some common opinions

• I simply like to have my own hardware and cloud services seem to be more expensive in the long run.
• There is not really a good market of used GPUs where I’m located (Singapore), so the common suggestion “go with as used 3090” does not really work.

Any good suggestions, or am I naive with my idea of a budget machine? Thanks a lot!