Local LLM Hardware Digest — week of September 14, 2026
Local LLM Hardware Digest
Week of September 14, 2026
What moved this week in local-inference hardware: measured throughput, real price movement, and what the subreddits are arguing about. Every number links to the runs behind it.
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Benchmarked this week
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 — 21.3 tok/s median at Q4
11 new runs from 1 source landed this week, on 6 GB of VRAM.
See every run and its source →
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Budget GPU price movement
Quadro RTX 4000 down 11% to $280
Tracked at $314 before. Amazon pricing moves daily — the price at checkout is the one that counts.
View current price →
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New this week
Llama 3.3 70B: Dual RTX 3060 12GB vs Ryzen 7 5800X CPU Offload (2026)
Llama 3.3 70B at Q4_K_M needs 42.5 GB, so two RTX 3060s and a DDR4 CPU host both offload. Sourced tok/s, quant sizes and which upgrade to buy first.
Read it →
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Best tok/s per dollar under $700
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti — 79.7 tok/s at 8B Q4 on 16 GB
Median of 8 community-reported runs. 16 GB is the tier where 8B models stop spilling to system RAM.
See the measurements →
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On the radar
Intel Core i5 14400F — 39 mentions and counting
Turning up across r/LocalLLaMA and r/hardware. Not yet in the SpecPicks benchmark catalog — it is in the queue, and this is a mention count, not a verdict.
Read the thread →
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Deciding rather than shopping?
The VRAM-tier table shows what each card fits at Q4 and how fast it actually generates.
Best GPUs for Running Local LLMs →
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