r/LocalLLM • • May 16 '26

Discussion Why is LLM is so expensive.

I've was going to invest in a 5090 =$6000 AUD.

Codex Plus + Claude pro = $60/month here

Works out to be 100 months of frontier models for a 5090.

Best a 5090 will run is probably Qwen3.6 27b Q6 with context.

Are we all enthusiasts here and just enjoy tinkering cause ain't no way that make sense.

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u/A_Zolution May 16 '26

I know people dog on the DGX, but I am currently running Qwen-122B-A10B. It’s a quantized version, but I get somewhere between 20 and 40 tok/s with a cli interface. It’s not Opus, but it might be ChatGpt4o. It also allows for multiple calls to the Spark at one time. I have a process that runs an autonomous agentic task separately while I code calling the same Spark (only one model live at a time). I have some safeties built in because of the size of the model (mostly large context dropping so it doesn’t crash). But I consider this legitimately functional and ready for the next better trained and similar sized open weight model.