I was interested in Stable Diffusion / images, and also text generation. I started playing with ComfyUI and Ollama. An M1 studio ultra would generate a 'base'

I was interested in Stable Diffusion / images, and also text generation. I started playing with ComfyUI and Ollama. An M1 studio ultra would generate a 'base' 512x512 image in around 6 seconds, and ollama responses seemed easily 'quick enough'. Faster than I could read. On an I7-3930K, purely CPU only, a similar image would take around 2.5 minutes, and ollama was painful, as I would be waiting for the next word. Then I switched to a 3080ti, which I hadn't been using for gaming as it got stupidly hot and I regretted having it. Suddenly it was redeemed. On the 3080ti, the same images come out in less than a second, and ollama generation is even faster. Sure, I'm limited to 7B models for text (the mac could go much higher) and there will be limits with image size/complexity, but this thing is so much faster than I expected, and hardly generates any heat/noise at the same time - completely different to gaming. This is all a simple install under linux (pop os in this case). tl;dr - A linux PC with a high-end GPU is the best value by far unless you really need big models, in my experience.