Where to buy a GPU for local AI

Every vendor listed here sells graphics cards suitable for running language models on your own hardware. That is a narrower claim than it sounds: a card is on this site because we hold its full specification and can work out which models it can hold and how fast it will generate text on them. If you are shopping for hardware to run an LLM locally rather than to play games, this is the part of the market that matters.

A listing is attached to a specific board variant rather than to a card name, which is a distinction that matters more here than almost anywhere else. The same name is often sold at several memory capacities, and capacity is what decides whether a model fits at all — so the listing you are looking at names exactly the board you would receive, and links to the page showing what that board runs.

The ordering that matters for inference is almost never the ordering a gaming benchmark produces. Generating a token means reading the model's weights out of memory once, so the two specifications that decide the outcome are how much memory the card has — which sets whether a model fits at all — and how fast it reads that memory, which sets how quickly the tokens come out. Core counts and clock speeds barely enter into it.

The practical consequence is that a slower card with more memory frequently beats a faster card with less, because the faster card simply cannot hold the model. It is the one place where the cheap-looking option is often the right one, and the reason a card page on this site leads with capacity rather than with a benchmark score.

Work out which card you want before you start comparing prices. Open any listing here and you can see what that exact board runs and roughly how fast, which is a better basis for a purchase than a headline number on a box.

Price is the obvious axis and the least complete one. A listing shows the price and the shipping cost separately because both are money spent to own the card, and a low price with expensive delivery from another continent is not the bargain it looks like. Where a card page shows several listings, they are ordered by that total rather than by the headline figure.

Beyond price: whether the card is in stock right now, what condition it is in, how long the warranty runs, which country it ships from, and whether a power supply is included — which is worth more than it sounds on the largest cards, since they often need more than a typical desktop supply provides. A vendor's own page collects everything they sell in one table, so you can see whether they are a specialist or listing a single card.

We do not sell hardware, take payment, hold stock, or handle any part of a transaction. Every listing is published by the vendor themselves and every purchase happens on their site, under their terms. Nothing here is a recommendation of a particular seller, and no vendor pays to appear or to rank higher — the order is verified vendors first, then whoever lists the most.

Prices are shown as the vendor supplied them and can go stale between their site and this page, so treat the figure here as a starting point rather than a quote. Outbound links carry no ranking signal, which is a deliberate choice: a directory that passed its authority to every listing on it would be a link farm rather than a reference.

What we do add is the part that is hard to find anywhere else — the answer to what a given card will actually run, calculated rather than quoted, sitting one click from the offer.