You Don't Need a $2,000 GPU for Local AI (Real Tests)

You don't need a $2,000, 24GB GPU to run local AI. I tested a 12GB card (RTX 4070 SUPER ... about $300 used for 12GB-class cards) and recorded the REAL tokens-per-second on my own machine — Wi-Fi off the whole time. The 7B coder hit 73.83 tokens/sec. Then I loaded a 32B model that needs ~20GB and you can watch it spill into regular RAM and crawl ... that moment is exactly what a 24GB card is actually for. Free setup checklist (the exact app + model + coding tool I run): comment "SETUP" ⏱️ Chapters 0:00 They say you need $2,000 0:38 Wi-Fi off — everything runs local 0:53 One command gets the model 1:53 The one rule: does it fit? (VRAM = the desk) 2:45 7B live test — 73.83 tokens/sec 5:22 14B — the sweet spot test (honest numbers) 8:27 The cliff — 32B spills into RAM 10:33 What you should actually buy 11:36 Free checklist + what card are you running? Models tested: Qwen2.5-Coder 7B / 14B / 32B via Ollama. Open-weight, Apache-2.0, runs fully offline. Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, 12GB VRAM. Honest note: the screen recorder was eating GPU during the runs, so your numbers land HIGHER than mine. #localai #llm #ai #coding #gpu #ollama #localllm