Hardware for local AI

Hardware guide

Compare machines before choosing a local AI path

This table compares common PCs, GPUs, unified-memory Macs and datacenter systems for local AI work. Use it to estimate which machines are realistic for learning, single-user experiments, multi-session serving or large-scale inference.

Memory capacity decides what can fit. Memory bandwidth is a rough signal for generation speed, but real LLM performance also depends on the runtime, quantization, context length and concurrency.

Before buying hardware: verify the selected hardware against the models, runtime, quantization, context length and concurrency you plan to use. Treat these estimates as a starting point, then check recent hands-on tests, benchmarks and videos for that setup.