Entry $2K 14B Build

Why this build

The most common first-time local LLM question is: what's the minimum spend for a good 14B experience? This build answers it. The RTX 4080 SUPER's 16 GB VRAM fits Qwen 2.5 14B at Q4_K_M with room for a 4K KV cache, which covers most interactive use cases — coding assist, document Q&A, summarization. At Q4_K_M, 14B model quality is close enough to full precision that the tradeoff is rarely noticeable in practice. The 7800X3D is slightly above entry-level, but its prefill advantage at 2K+ context makes the model feel noticeably more responsive than a budget CPU would. Compared to the Local Dev Starter, this build shares the same GPU but trims the RAM to 32 GB (sufficient for a single-user 14B workload) and uses a slightly smaller PSU. It isn't a stepping stone to 70B — that requires a VRAM upgrade, not a PSU swap.