PhD student weighs used 3090s, modded 3080 20GB, or new 32GB R9700 for local LLM homelab
MrSkullking · reddit · 2026-10-14
A PhD student posted on r/LocalLLaMA for GPU upgrade advice. Their Proxmox homelab (RTX 3060 12GB + GTX 1660) runs Qwen3 14B for Paperless tagging, a Telegram bot, Whisper/Kokoro for Home Assistant, Jellyfin transcoding and Immich ML. They want to run an agent orchestrator like Hermes Agent on a 27B-class model with persistent memory, meeting transcription, calendar planning and Home Assistant integration — with all lab data kept local.
Options at current Dutch prices: used 3090s at €1100–1400 each (fastest, but 24GB limits 27B to Q4/Q5, and two triple-slot cards won't fit); two modded 3080 20GB blowers at €650–900 each (40GB total, but concerns about tax, noise and long-term reliability of memory mods); or a new 32GB AMD R9700 at €2000 (warranty, Q6 with plenty of context, but slower than a 3090 and not CUDA). Power matters too: at €0.27/kWh, an always-on 1000W+ triple-GPU box isn't cheap.
Open questions: whether Q4/Q5 vs Q6/Q8 matters for agentic tool-calling; durability of modded 3080s; ROCm/Vulkan under Proxmox passthrough alongside NVIDIA; whether PCIe 3.0 x16 on X99 bottlenecks tensor parallelism; and whether Flash-Next with experts offloaded to DDR4 is usable.
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