About this site, and me

I'm Richard Baxter. I've spent the best part of fifteen years in technical SEO - I founded Builtvisible - and these days I build AI tooling at Houtini. This site is where I write up the hardware I run local models on, from my own bench in the UK.

It started with a gaming PC and got out of hand. One card became two, two became a frame in the corner of the office, and somewhere in there I stopped caring about frame rates and started caring about how many tokens a second a 70B model would give me. The machine I use daily is a dual RTX 4090 48GB rig, 96GB of VRAM between the pair, running vLLM in Docker. Most of what you'll read here has been through it.

Buying for local AI is a strange market to shop in. The spec sheets are written for datacentre buyers, the YouTube numbers are usually from a different quantisation than the one you'll run, and UK prices bear very little relation to the US ones everyone quotes. So the aim here is narrow and useful: what each machine actually costs to buy in Britain, what it will really load, and roughly how fast it answers once it has.

The rule I hold to is that I benchmark what I publish, and where I haven't, I say so plainly. Some of this hardware I own. Some of it I've had hands on. Some of it I've only got manufacturer figures and other people's measurements for, and those pages carry the sourcing right there on the page so you can weigh it yourself. Specs get checked against the manufacturer or a proper teardown before they ship. When a number turns out to be wrong, I correct it rather than quietly leave it.

Some links here earn me a small commission, and they're labelled where they appear. It has never changed a verdict and it isn't going to. That's rather the point of running my own site.

Corrections, better numbers, or a build you're proud of? I'd like to hear about it.

- Richard Baxter · Houtini