The Software Decides What the Hardware Is Worth

Local inference is as much a software question as a hardware one. The same box can be quick or close to useless depending on which runtime you install, which file format the model ships in, and whether the part of the machine you paid extra for is the part that runtime knows how to use. Weights that sit entirely in graphics memory produce text at a conversational pace, and the same weights spilling into system memory produce it at a crawl.

Work out what you intend to run before choosing parts. A chat assistant, an image generator, a transcription pipeline and a code-completion model make very different demands, and some are content with a processor while others need a card that will hold full load for minutes at a time. Settle the runtime and the workload first, then specify the machine around the largest item on that list.