Yes, I have a desktop with a radeon 9700 ai pro with 32GB of VRAM. Its more than doubled since I bought it but its basically a down clocked 9070xt with double the VRAM. I also have a little arc b50 in my server.

Mostly yeah use it for privacy reasons. I run llama.CPP directly and access via open webui. I host a searx instance for it to use as web search. Mostly run qwen3.6/3.8 or gemma4 on the radeon and almost exclusively gptoss 20b on the B50 along with a second small model for tags and titles in open webui. Yeah I just use it mostly as a basic chatbot or as an agent in obsidian using the engram plugin. Helps search and summarize years of notes and works pretty well.

I’ve tried to use it as a coding assistant in zed without much luck so usually just post my code into open webui for feedback and it works alot better for me.

Yeah I can access it with other machines on my network including phone with conduit app. I can get to it on the go by connecting to home network with wireguard and sending a magic packet to wakeup desktop.

I havent done any image gen nor have much use for it outside of maybe using it to make app icons in the style of papirus icons for programs they don’t and won’t support.

It definitely feels more comprable to first ai wave than current frontier models but the privacy and price trade off is worth it to me. I’d say using it in obsidian has been the best use of it so far and one I certainly wouldn’t trust to an external AI.

Raid z1 with 10 14tb disks? That’s a bold move cotton, let’s see how it plays out.