The answer — one pick, priced
Get the
RTX 5060 Ti 16GB
No budget ceiling
The best performance-per-dollar in local AI under $600 across 9 tested sources — 16GB GDDR7 pushes 51 tok/s on 8B models and handles 7–20B comfortably.
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Fit ledger — need → measured evidence
■ The catch — co-equal billing, always
16GB is a hard ceiling. It tops out around 20B models — a 70B model needs ~38–42GB and simply won't fit, dropping you 5–20x onto CPU offload. And you must buy the 16GB variant, not the 8GB.
Dealbreaker? Runner-up №2 doubles VRAM to 24GB for bigger models ↓
■ Every product has a catch. Verdicts that hide it are how bad buys happen.
Runners-up — if your needs differ
Adjacent verdicts — same method
Traps — this verdict avoids
The VRAM cliff
VRAM is a hard ceiling. If the model does not fit entirely in VRAM, performance collapses 5–20x from CPU offloading — and no amount of compute power makes up for it. Budget ~2GB per billion parameters at FP16, ~0.5GB at Q4.
MSRP is fiction
Street prices ran far above MSRP through mid-2026 amid a GDDR memory shortage — the RTX 5090 lists around $4,330 against a $1,999 MSRP. Budget for the street price, never the launch number.
Bandwidth beats TFLOPS
Token generation is memory-bandwidth-bound, not compute-bound. GDDR7 Blackwell cards deliver 50–78% more bandwidth than last gen — and that, not raw TFLOPS or gaming FPS, is what sets your tokens-per-second.
Provenance — 9 sources, dated
Winners are picked before affiliate payouts are checked, from the full research dossier at knowledgelib.io. Prices, stock and listings are re-verified monthly by an automated pipeline. Some links earn us a commission — it never changes the pick, and we say so here rather than in a footer you'd never read.