So my specs are:
CPU: i5 12th Gen
GPU: 3070
RAM: 16GB
I’ve considered a number of options for upgrading, and adding some more RAM seems to be the simplest & cheapest option for the potential improvements; 8GB RAM chips seem to still be reasonably priced, I have 2 free RAM slots, performance would experience an objective increase, and it would perhaps allow me to start effectively using self-hosted AI systems instead of dropping $20/month on Claude. But…is this advisable, and is it really as simple as plugging the extra RAM in? It’s a homebuilt, but it’s been a good few years since I really fiddled around with the internals.
Since you obviously can’t use unified RAM, VRAM is going to make the most notable difference in locally run LLMs. But even if you do get a more powerful GPU, unless you drop thousands of dollars on one with more VRAM (on top of other components you may need to upgrade as well), you are, unfortunately, not going to have anything comparable to frontier cloud models.
The $20 a month is going to be far more affordable. Again, this is all by design so that you are locked into cloud models once you get hooked onto LLMs.