Is a $420 Xeon X99 box with 256GB RAM worth it for LLM inference?
Ammoryyy · reddit · 2026-10-30
A user found a used workstation for $420: Xeon E5-2640 v3 (8C/16T), X99 board, 16GB DDR4 (planning to upgrade to 256GB), 128GB SSD, plus a 1080p 144Hz monitor. He plans to add his RTX 3090 Ti 24GB and use Strata Engine for RAM/VRAM offloading to run large LLMs.
He asks whether the old Xeon's CPU and memory bandwidth would make inference painfully slow, noting it's one of the few affordable local platforms that might support over 128GB RAM.
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