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Notes -
I don't know about Grok's image gen specifically, but having used Stable Diffusion for almost 2 years now, I can tell you that the cutting edge image generation stuff can be run reasonably fast (about 30-60s per a batch of 4 512x512 images) on a 5 year old gaming PC with an Nvidia 1070 that I was already using as my home computer, without any upgrades. I did upgrade to a more modern gaming PC with a 4090 last year, which can do a batch of 4 512x512 images in a few seconds. The entire new PC I bought, primarily for gaming, was around $4,500, with the largest chunk of that coming from the GPU, which you could probably cheapen out on with a 4080 or a 3090 and get plenty good performance.
I’ve been using Stable Diffusion on a 5 year old second hand laptop where the gpu was basically a ”well, might as well get it since the extra cost is just 50e” type of thing. Combine that with preconfigured uncensored cloud rental services and unrestricted image generation is ridiculously affordable if you care at all.
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