Hey everyone! I’ve been diving deep into the world of local AI recently, mostly playing around with LLMs and Stable Diffusion, but I’ve hit a wall with my current hardware. I really want to start experimenting with fine-tuning smaller models like Llama 3 or Mistral using LoRA, but my old card just isn't cutting it anymore and keeps crashing due to out-of-memory errors.

I’m on a pretty tight budget, ideally looking to spend under $400, but I’m torn on which direction to go. I know NVIDIA is basically a must because of CUDA support and library compatibility, but I’m struggling to decide between raw speed and VRAM capacity. I've been looking at a used RTX 3060 12GB because of that extra memory headroom, but then I see the RTX 4060 and wonder if the newer architecture is worth the trade-off in total VRAM. Is 12GB even enough for decent fine-tuning these days, or should I be looking at something like a used 3080 if I can find a deal?

I'm totally fine with buying used gear if it means getting better performance for the price. Given a $300-$400 limit, what do you think is the best value GPU that balances VRAM and processing power for a beginner getting into local model training?