Comment by JumpCrisscross
2 days ago
The funny thing is Claude Cowork has taught me to be patient with response timelines. I’m now figuring I’ll be running locally no later than 2028.
(I want to spend no more than $10k. And I want to run a model comparable to today’s SOTA.)
For 10k you can buy a used dual socket Intel or amd based rackmount server with a terabyte of ram, and run models on cpu only at a reasonable speed. Same server would have been 4-5k a couple years ago before ram price rise.
Or buy one on eBay with 512GB that has half its slots populated and then buy the matching 512GB kit to add.
Which CPU gen are you suggesting, is there any writeup on such setup where <10K (not incl. power bill) cpu only rig is giving usable token speeds on latest SoTA open weights models?
In my experience with rig half that cost, entire exercise of running coding models locally has been a huge disappointment.
Cost/Value when compared to cloud services is just not there, but I see the merit for those who value privacy over quality of output and want a backup of huge condensed corpus of data within their control.
Kudos to OP though, They had clear goals and they achieved it.
I realized I didn't answer the CPU question, as a very quickly chosen example from eBay, there's a Dell R740XD with two Xeon Gold 6254 CPUs, 768GB RAM for sale for something like $5799 USD right now. I'm sure if I put some more time into it I could piece together something with a full terabyte for around the same price. Or faster/better CPUs, more core count CPUs by buying the system with no RAM, or minimal RAM (64GB) and then adding the DIMM kits from the more reputable refurb server part vendors on ebay.
It won't be fast at all, for certain, but it'll have enough memory to prove a configuration and be able to really use gargantuan GGUF format LLMs in the latest compiled llama-server. Re: electricity, I pay the equivalent of $0.07 ro $0.09 USD per kWh so it's not an extreme burden to have a theoretical 500W server running. Something like $35 to $50 of electricity a month if it's 500W 24x7.
4 replies →
I think there is a good sized population of people who absolutely don't want to submit everything they do to an off site service, or let their content be used for unknown training purposes, and will tolerate slowness at 1 to 10 tok/s as a tradeoff.
Or people who want or need to run an uncensored (abliterated) gguf file to deal with controversial topics that a paid LLM service will refuse to work with or ban you for.
8 replies →
I would suspect that one would buy based on mem-bus & PCIe bus speeds more than CPU for this, and just dial down the CPU parameters to save power. Most of the time and power will be consumed by memory and bus transfers because the CPU will mostly be waiting to the right set of weights and factors to multiply.
[flagged]
This was the case a few years ago, but now the RAM costs twice that much by itself, and the server is sold without RAM.
> (I want to spend no more than $10k. And I want to run a model comparable to today’s SOTA.)
The question is, will you want to run a model comparable to today's (meaning 2026) SOTA in 2028? Humans always want the latest shiny LLM model.
> I want to run a model comparable to today’s SOTA.
It says so in the quoted text, yes.
Today's SOTA also sounds totally sufficient to me, but I wonder how much our standards will inflate by 2028. Maybe a lot, maybe not at all...very hard to say.
This seems to vary by person. I get immense value in coding assistance from Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B which is like a frontier model from a year ago. But a lot of people say it’s stupid, useless, a toy, etc. I do work by the “short leash” method and mainly just use the model for brainstorming/planning/design assistance and zipping through the drudgery of boilerplate and executing refactors. I don’t think this tier of model is good for “hey LLM, build me a Github clone” ... but I also don’t see the value in that use anyway.
Could you expand more on what you do with qwen3.6? Because I couldn't get the denser 27B version to do trivial "take this pattern, repeat it over a single file with minimal thought, just slightly beyond what I can do with sed" reliably.
3 replies →
Caveat: I have not been able to try that model locally, so no personal experience. Running this locally at usable speeds would be cost prohibitive for personal coding use for me.
But if we can believe you that it's doing what a Claude model was doing a year ago then I'd say: OMG no I really never want to go back to that level of frustration getting an agent to do what I want it to do.
1 reply →
> I don’t think this tier of model is good for “hey LLM, build me a Github clone” ... but I also don’t see the value in that use anyway.
What could be more valuable than outputting the exact thing you asked for?
2 replies →
Looking at how critical we are about today’s models, vs where we were last year, and I don’t expect anyone to be content with Fable-class models in 2028.
Expectations seem to be rising at a faster rate than models can improve.