Buyer's Guides
Practical buying decisions for local LLM hardware: ranked GPU picks per model size, per framework, and per budget — with the trade-offs explained, not just a price-to-spec table.
Browse all 50 buyer's guides- Best Laptop GPU for Local LLM: 8GB to 24GB Mobile VRAM decides which model you run and nothing else does. NVIDIA's laptop tiers mapped to published model sizes, plus where the KV cache eats the rest.
- Best GPU for Qwen 3.8 in 2026: Why 16GB Is Not Enough Qwen 3.8 27B ships as an 18GB Q4_K_M download, so a 16GB card cannot hold it. VRAM tiers, GPU picks, and what the vision encoder costs.
- Best GPU for DeepSeek V4: The Honest VRAM Math (81GB Minimum) DeepSeek V4-Flash needs roughly 81-96GB for its smallest quants. The real numbers for 4x RTX 3090 rigs, 128GB Mac Studio, and cloud H200s.
- Best Cloud GPU for LLM in 2026: What to Rent by Model Size Rent an RTX 4090 from ~$0.35/hr for 7B-13B models, an H100 at ~$2-3/hr for 70B. The exact cloud GPU to rent for every LLM size in 2026.