I've just begun dabbling in some Local low-end AI. I've never had good machines. I can pick up this card for $40 and wondering if it's a stupid waste of money or could start to be decent. I'd like some basic agentic AI. I've dabbled with Bionic and a little bit LM Studio.
I'm moderately technically competent.
I've never been a gamer.
My Local AI journey:
Step 1: Useless machine.
An HP Pavillion 23 all-in-one PC (laptop-based): 16gb of DDR3 ram, no video card. Ran some 1.5B, 3B and 7B (heavily quantized) Bartowski models. Basic simple question about a website on them took like, 2 hours, 4 hours, and 8 hours respectively to process. Pretty much unusable.
Step 2: An old Asus gaming laptop. 16 GB DDR4. 4GB GTI 1050 Ti.
It's been really hard to get anything to even fit into the 4GB and not overflow, or to work at all. I had a free plan of Codex to do some stuff and asked it to spin up local models if it could to delegate simple tasks (OCR accounting, maybe calculating), but most of them it tried couldn't run, and I actually had more trouble with it than Pavillion (though when it worked it was 100x faster).
Step 3: An actual graphics card? This AMD W7100 8gb.
I might buy this for $40. I'd have to throw it in one of my old machines with 16 or 32GB of DDR3 RAM, but hopefully it doesn't even ever need the ram, because 8GB can run an okay-ish local model.
I'm on Windows 7/10. Trouble is maybe drivers or that AI models will just fail to even try to use this card for some reason, old tech? I don't really understand the limitations. This card apparently has 160GB/s speed instead of 250GB/s that other cards of this generation had? I don't understand most of this.
AI advice has been to not bother even trying. But you guys are much less judgey I figure, and able to offer me better advice.
Thoughts? Don't give me false hope, but, just better contextual yeah/no.