[ekidd]

For what it's worth, eBay in the US currently has some used 3090s for about $1,300, including some marked "Buy it now." I got mine used for about $1,000, and I'm really happy with it—it's a very solid gaming card for Steam on Linux (if you don't need ray tracing), and it allows me to experiment with models up to about 35B parameters. I'm not saying it's a good investment for you in particular, of course! But it's solid at that price, and you can just chuck it in any consumer gaming rig and get a really fun AI "home lab".

As for models, I'm really genuinely impressed with Gemma4 26B A4B and Qwen3.6 35B A3B right now. Between them, I've seen solid image analysis, good medium-image OCR on very tough images, very good understanding of short stories, good structured data extraction from documents, extremely good language translation, etc. If you wanted to build a custom tool which summarized your inbox/RSS feeds/local news every day, or extracted information from emails and entered it into a database, or automatically captioned images, those tasks are all viable locally. The quality of the results is up dramatically in the last 12 months. At this point, my old personal non-agentic LLM benchmarks are "saturated": All the current leading models score extremely well on literally anything I was asking last year.

It's the true agentic coding workflows where the big models really stand out. And those models are all large enough that the hardware needs to amortized over enough users to run 24 hours/day.