LocalLLaMA Hardware Hunters Face RAM Crunch

The real story here is not "which mini PC is best" so much as "how much unified memory now costs." Local LLM hardware has turned into a memory-arbitrage game, and the price floor keeps creeping up.

• –Minisforum's MS-S1 Max and GMKtec's EVO-X2 both sit in the roughly $2.5k-$3k band for 128GB configs, which is exactly the pricing pain the thread is reacting to.
• –Tiiny AI's Pocket Lab is cheaper around $1.3k-$1.4k, but 80GB is a different class of machine if the goal is running 120B models locally with headroom.
• –Framework Desktop has already raised prices because LPDDR5x costs keep climbing, which suggests this is a broader memory-supply problem, not one bad vendor.
• –The Bosgame feedback concern is rational: once you spend four figures on local AI hardware, support, thermals, firmware, and QA matter as much as raw specs.
• –My read: if you need local inference now, the market says "pay up"; if this is exploratory, waiting for RAM pricing to normalize is probably the smarter move.