How is everyone dealing with PC part prices for local AI? I swear a strong PC was about 30% cheaper in 2024
I've been running ComfyUI locally for image generation and I'm kind of shocked by how expensive it has become to keep up with the hardware side of AI.
In 2024 I had an i7-14700F, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD and RTX 4060 8GB. It wasn't some insane workstation, but it worked fine for pretty heavy ComfyUI use. I'm often generating images for 10 to 12 hours at a time. Some of my Krea 2 workflows are pretty large and I use custom LoRAs, image editing, masks etc.
Now that I've had to replace the PC, it feels like getting something that is actually a meaningful step up costs way more than it did a couple of years ago.
The RTX 5060 is faster than my 4060 but still only has 8GB VRAM. Once I start looking for 16GB+ VRAM, 32 to 64GB RAM and enough SSD space for ComfyUI models and other assets, I'm suddenly looking at around NZ$4k.
Maybe I'm remembering 2024 prices wrong, but it feels like I could have built a pretty strong PC for roughly 40% less back then.
How are people who use ComfyUI heavily dealing with this price increase?
Are you just keeping older hardware longer, buying used 3090s, paying the current prices, using cloud GPUs, or accepting slower generations?
I'm particularly interested in people doing local AI image generation rather than gaming.