[ekidd]

It's probably more that LLM inference speed comes from having a large amount of fast RAM. And fast RAM is brutally expensive right now.

At this point, your cost-efficient options include used 3090s, "frankenrigs" using recycled data center cards, and a handful of "workstation" class cards, where the originally high margins and the long enterprise purchasing cycles have kept prices from going up too fast.

In contrast, a lot of these "personal" AI systems are basically a GPU-like core wired to larger amounts of slow RAM. Which is still semi-affordable. Generally speaking, they make for OK chatbots but extremely slow coding agents. Whereas you can run a modestly useful coding agent at reasonable speed on a 3090.

So yeah, a lot of these systems are bit scammy. But not because it's a secret conspiracy to protect data center cards. Rather, there simply isn't enough fast RAM in the entire world. So they'll flog you disappointly slow RAM instead.

TL;dr: Might be useful for some use cases, but benchmark very carefully.