Not really. Models that can run on a $250 card may be able to produce a decent word doc sometimes, but the fidelity of such models is so poor that it's no longer very attractive for general use on those types of tasks.

i might have agreed with you 4 months ago, but today with open source models i am surprised as anyone with the progress compared to frontier... so much so that i also picked up one of those $250 cards!

Have you tried qwen3.6-27b or Gemma 4? gemma4-26b-a4b is particularly impressive for its balance of speed and performance

Then I buy a very expensive GPU rack and timeshare it with a couple of friends.