thank you folks. Your input gives me a decent starting point. I’ll start digging based on info/experiences shared, maybe I can find someone locally selling old GPU with enough ram for cheap

well, I intend on scavenging for parts as I can’t really afford today’s prices. And since I don’t really know what should I grab as minimum specs I don’t even know what to look for. I could try to look for old(er) gaming rigs people sell or maybe there are some business workstations that may be sold in bulk. Either way, knowing what’s the minimum viable set of specs for running qwen or claude locally would be helpful

I’ve got some circa 2010 cards laying about with a 32Gb server that already has 8Gb carved out for TrueNAS, so essentially I could squeeze 16-24Gb out of it, but it’s an older i5 Intel CPU