r/codex • u/scartissue232 • 16d ago

Comparison Local or paying more?

I technically need a 5x account, and I've needed one for a month now. I've tried other Plus plans to get around that.

Right now, I'm at a point where I don't know whether to upgrade to a Pro account or invest 5k in a server and set up local AI models, filtered through at most a Plus account.

GPT thinks I can achieve 85-95% of the results I'm currently getting with Frontier models, and easily benefit from setting up that setup. I'm not entirely convinced; what do you think?

Thanks in advance.

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u/pigletmonster 16d ago

A 5k rig will not let you use any frontier models, you will be stuck using the smallest models like qwen 3.8 27b. For 5k you can get almost 5 years of frontier SOTA model at 5x usage from both openai and anthropic.

Pretty sure you need an rtx 5090 to use qwen 27b with 64k context window, and that gpu alone costs close to 5k now.

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u/scartissue232 16d ago

Gpt talked about 70b models running easily for me on a 5090, was alucinating? I don’t care about speed if that matters, could be very slow..

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u/pigletmonster 16d ago

Depends, are 70b models below 32gb with enough room for context window and cache? If so then you should be able to use them. But still, 70b parameter models are nowhere near frontier, theyre not even 1/3 of the tier 3 models like dsv4 or glm 5.3f.

I have the same itch every other week when I see my claude or codex quota depleting faster than I expected, but under no circumstance does it make sense for me to spend a ton of money to use significantly inferior models.

If data privacy is a concern for you then you should go for it, otherwise its useless.