NVIDIA RTX 3090 - The Budget 24GB Value King
Full specs and benchmarks for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 - 24GB GDDR6X at 936 GB/s, Ampere architecture, and why used 3090s remain the best value option for local AI inference in 2026.
Budget
Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
Google's cheapest Gemini model pairs a 1M-token context window with $0.10/$0.40 per million token pricing, multimodal input, and 359 tokens/second throughput for high-volume production workloads.
GPT-4o mini
OpenAI's budget API workhorse pairs 128K context with $0.15/$0.60 per million token pricing, solid coding benchmarks, and the broadest third-party ecosystem of any small model.
