Opinion/Rant on buying high end GPUs for PC build for AI/ML stuff
I am a Data Scientist with total of 15 years experience. I am writing this post to talk about nephew who is going to graduate his B.Tech in computer science in June/July 2026.
Recently he is pestering my elder brother(his dad) for a PC build. he already has a good laptop worth 2Lakh. I dont know from where did he get the idea for PC build for AI/ML stuff and learning. I was pretty pissed off when he came with quotation of over 5 lakh rupees.
This is the config he is looking at -> Ryzen 9, 64 GB ram and a 5090 GPU. Truth be told I was pretty pissed looking at it. My brother just asked me to check and talk to my nephew and understand the technicality. Since my brother is a businessman he doesn't understand all these things.
I met with them and started talking to nephew. He thought he could talk his way out of the conversation. He started saying random stuff that he wants to trains LLMs from scratch, build agentic AI systems and Stable diffusion and what not. I understood there itself that it was all B.S. Then he started saying he wants to do freelance and so on....I was still not convinced. He still couldn't give me a straight answer as to why did he need a 32GB GPU and on top of it a 64GB RAM. He again started throwing random words like transformer training, CNN image workload.
After all this, he said one thing which convinced that this was all a sham......He said ok I will change the GPU to AMD radeon. That's when I realised. He doesn't even know that AMD cannot support CuDA and need a Nvidia for this.
I asked him if you really want to build a PC do it within 2 lakh with less specs like 16GB and a 30 series GPU.
I genuinely want to ask the AI/ML freelancers here if any....do you guys really feel the need for a 64GB ram or a 50 series GPU which itself will cost about 4 lakh+. Also, what is that you need a GPU that cannot be done on Kaggle or Google Colab with free quota GPU limit. Of all the years I have worked as a Data Scientist I have never felt the need for a personal GPU. Most of the DS work still in companies are traditional ML stuff with numbers. Only few companies do Image work, Stable diffusion is still even rarer.
Just want to understand the ROI of buying these expensive GPUs for learning/freelance work