gavinj.net

I wanted to know whether a sub-$3k Australian workstation GPU could run useful modern local LLMs. The short answer is yes, if you pick the right model, the right quant, and build around the 24GB VRAM limit instead of pretending it is a tiny cloud.

Google's Gemma 4 models are impressive, but the real story is the licensing. For the first time, a major AI lab has released capable open models under a true Apache 2.0 license. Here's why that changes everything.