2xCMP 170 HX, epyc 9654 ES. I won't pretend its cheap, the value of this setup has probably doubled or tripled since i've bought the components.

On the cheap end you can do something like qwen 3.8 27B with 24GB on a laptop, and a very minimal linux configuration. That's more similar to my previous setup.

You can also do a lot more with mixed setups like cpu-moe. I could probably run GLM 5.2 on this hardware with the right setup, albeit without LoRA. I know people have been doing this to run qwen 3.8-flash-next with 32GB cards.