256GB of ECC RAM costs almost as much as two 64-core Threadripper 9980X CPUs, making the RAM cost alone a non-starter for a local LLM build

I get great AI inference results on a 16-core 9950X AMD CPU with 128GB of RAM. On Qwen3.8 35B, I get about 40 tok/s, and I was entertaining the idea of getting a Threadripper to do the same thing. But then I checked ECC RAM prices on eBay and was shocked: $7,500 for 256GB of ECC RAM, almost twice t…

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1. 2026-10-16 20:00 · r/LocalLLM
   256GB of ECC RAM costs almost as much as two 64-core Threadripper 9980X CPUs, making the RAM cost alone a non-starter for a local LLM build