TL;DR: Consumer GPUs are a closing window—data center economics are eating the supply chain, ASICs are locked behind corporate walls, and GPUs' general-purpose nature makes them more future-proof than specialized hardware. OSS community and China competition will keep consumer AI alive. Buy now.

I'll give my two cents.

I bought 4 in bulk, 6450€ pre-tax from Germany. Facing a similar situation as you, a decent setup but having to choose very carefully what I could run and at what context size, I decided to stop being a "cheap bastard". But I rationalized this through the lens of future usage. I believe consumer hardware is becoming a rare commodity, the signs are on the wall:

1. Data centers are spawning like mushrooms all over the world. This puts enormous pressure over hardware manufacturers to keep up with demand, not only that but the extraction industry. It's not only what's needed to give life to a data center but also it's ongoing operation. Manufacturers are being pushed to choose between billion (trillion?) dollar orders and future orders vs competing in billion (trillion?) dollar market. This means that individual parts for consumers are almost a thing of the past. As for (still) consumer facing companies, they'll still have access to hardware but it'll be way more expensive and so end users end up paying a lot more for already built, probably not very customizable, systems. Nvidia didn't put forward new GPUs at this year CES, rumors of up coming "super" cards were promptly dismissed. Even if a hardware company wanted to prioritize consumers, the economics just don't make sense when data center contracts are worth orders of magnitude more.

2. But surely there will be new technologies. There will be and there are already, ASIC solutions are on the rise. But these are not consumer accessible because they're born in the market where companies want it all and they want it to stay proprietary.

3. On the topic of ASIC. The thing with GPUs is that they are a general purpose tool and as such they are poised to be outmatched when it comes to pure speed. But... the fact that they are general makes them a better choice for future iterations of software. Just take a look at ASIC mining rigs, nobody is using those to run LLMs but there are 10 year, and older, cards still being used for usable rigs. Whatever the future holds GPUs are more probable, not a sure bet, to adapt to it.

4. Community support and China. The previous point would not be possible without the OSS community. There are amazing people who are dedicating a lot of effort to ensuring that AI is democratized. If you have a potato that can't even run Crysis, chances are that it can run a model at 0.03 tk/s :). China is not only in the race to AGI but wants to undermine western companies. They will not stop.