Llmspeed: Feel Local LLM Speed Before You Buy Hardware

Before spending money on a graphics card for a local AI model, it helps to know what the real experience will feel like. Llmspeed is a free calculator: pick the hardware, from an RTX 3090 to a Mac Studio, pick the model, and see a simulated reply speed, tokens per second, and time to first word.

The numbers come from open community measurements, from the subreddit r/LocalLLaMA (an online forum about local AI models) and from localscore.ai (a site that collects speed benchmarks for AI models). For combinations nobody has benchmarked yet, it shows an estimate based on the hardware specs instead. The tool itself is open source, with code and data on GitHub (a site for hosting and sharing code).

Claims that a local model on a laptop matches Opus or Fable (Anthropic's top models) in real agent work don't hold up for serious use. But before buying a graphics card for a local model, it's more useful to see on screen how much slower it will be than a cloud model, rather than finding out after the purchase.