5060 Ti 16GB or Cloud: Which makes more sense for DL, RL, and LLM studies/research? [D]

Hi everyone,

If you have purchased (at least one) GPU(s) for ML/DL studies and research: How is your experience and is it worth it? What do you use it for and how is the ROI?

I have a MacBook Pro with M4 from some years ago, while MPS is useful in many occasions, it's no substitute for a NVDA GPU with CUDA support. So recently I am considering getting a 5060 Ti 16GB, but a GPU cannot run itself, so I then also need to buy other parts (e.g., CPU, RAM, SSD, motherboard, and so on...), which has been getting more expensive lately, especially the RAM.

Since I'm still in job-seeking mode, I will mostly use it for learning DL, RL, and LLM-related things and local experiments (e.g., Stanford CS336), or low-level ones like GPU kernel programming and so on. Do you think a local physical GPU would help, or in my case a cloud service like Modal would suffice?

Many thanks!