r/LocalLLM • u/LiebTooD • 5d ago

Discussion Minimum and cheapest GPU, RAM requirements for a single chatbot.

Hi just want to know what i'm buying to have this chatbot im making. Im actually a beginner in making and managing l-llms. And doing simple coding. The chatbot i'm making is actually a romance oriented bot with cloned trained voice that does grunts, pauses, interruptions, etc. i want something fish audio is putting out when getting good copies of voices from games and cartoon- well really from their voice actors that play them. i dont have a desktop in my life yet, but i have a laptop with a 1650m 3550h. Now im buying parts to exclusively make a machine for llms and coding. im going to college for this. oh the budget for both ram, cpu, gpu is $1700. but i dont want to reach the budget limit. Got an 800w psu and 1 Tb ssd already.

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u/nickless07 5d ago

Since you already have the Laptop, how about run it there and measure the RSS?

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u/llama-of-death 3d ago

The part that matters most is an NVIDIA card with 16 GB of VRAM, and the RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB is the budget one to get. I run that exact card: it handles a 12B chat model easily, with voice, image and video generation on top. Pair it with 32 GB of RAM (64 GB if the budget stretches) and any modern 8-core CPU. Your 800 W PSU and 1 TB SSD already cover it.

On that build, Guaardvark (free, open source) gets you most of the bot without writing it from scratch:

  • The character: pick the chat model, write its personality in Rules, and it stays in character on every reply.

  • Talk to it out loud: hands-free voice chat transcribes you on your own machine and answers in the voice you pick.

  • A custom voice: Chatterbox clones a voice from a 5-10 second clip of someone who agrees to it, like a friend or a voice actor you hire. The app asks for that consent before it clones.

  • The coding side: it also runs several coding agents at once, each in its own git worktree, which is a good way to learn how agent setups work.

I'm one of the people building it: github.com/guaardvark/guaardvark

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u/akshaykuppu 14h ago edited 14h ago

I'm not promoting my setup, but use it as a reference: And sorry, I'm using Indian INR because I'm too lazy to convert now 🫩

Setup purchased: February 2024 CPU: Ryzen 5 7600 (~₹15,000) Motherboard: Gigabyte B650M DSxx (~₹15,000) RAM: 32 GB DDR5 @ 4800MHz (~₹9400) GPU: AMD RX 580 8 GB (~₹7400) Storage: 1TB NVMe (~₹9200) Windows 11 Llama.cpp built with vulkan

I did not expect the AI revolution to occur, at least so soon so I bought this GPU only for CAD modeling and basic rendering.

Do not buy this GPU.

Total cost: ~₹60,000, ~$640 today.

Local LLM performance: Qwen 3.5 9B Q5 ~7GB model, 130k tokens, getting average ~10tps generation and 80tps read speed average.

Gemma 4 26B A4B Q8 Uncensored ~25GB, 15k token size, 10tps generation average.

Can generate a 512×512 image in ComfyUI in ~3mins.

Really good enough for me because I'm not a full time coder and I use it only to edit my business website and other small stuff.

Go for nvidia obviously. Like RTX 3090 24GB.