Builds

Complete parts lists at real prices, grouped by budget. Prices checked every Monday. Pick a tier, compare the candidates.

Guided picker · Price history

$3k tier

The starter

$2,599

M4 Max 64GB: every decision model, every small LLM, real work, done.

Technical difficulty: 1/4 · plug in and go

The value pick

$699

A used RTX 3090: 24GB of VRAM for the price of a phone. The secondhand door into real local AI.

Technical difficulty: 2/4 · seat and go

$5k tier

The desk build

$5,499

One M5 Ultra 96GB: the 27B-and-under sweet spot with 200B-class quantized guests.

Technical difficulty: 1/4 · plug in and go

$12k tier

The GPU rig

$9,963

One 96GB Blackwell + two 3090s for KV cache: the tinkerer's 30k answer at half the price.

Technical difficulty: 3/4 · plan the power

$20k tier

The Spark cluster

$14,097

Three DGX Sparks, 384GB pooled over ConnectX: the compact rack that punches up.

Technical difficulty: 2/4 · seat and go

$50k tier

The quad 5090 server rig

$7,996

Four RTX 5090s: 128GB of VRAM and 7,168 GB/s of aggregate bandwidth, for people who know what a power budget is.

Technical difficulty: 4/4 · server room

The $30k question

$11,998

The budget from the 'Mac Studios or Spark?' thread: one 512GB Mac Studio, the big models, no cloud bill.

Technical difficulty: 2/4 · seat and go