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by Smith42 846 days ago
$15k!
1 comments

Which is not unreasonable for that amount of hardware.

You have to ask yourself if you want to drop that kind of money on consumer GPUs, which launched late 2022. But then again, with that kind of money you are stuck with consumer GPUs either way, unless you want to buy Ada workstation cards for 6k each and those are just 4090s with p2p memory enabled. Hardly worth the premium, if you don't absolutely have to have that.

I believe the ada workstation cards are typically 1slot cards

which means you could build a 4gpu server from normal cases.

most of the 4090 cards are 2-3 slot cards

The beefy workstation cards are 2 slots, but yeah the 4090 cards are usually 3.something slots, which is ridiculous. The few dual slot ones are water cooled.
the work station cards also run on 300 watts and looks like the 4090 goes to 450.

so you are getting a better practical card for the price

if you are making a mining type rig, then yeah, the extra price is wasting money.

but if you wanted to build a normal machine, the workstation cards are the most reasonable choice for anything more than 2 gpus

I find it challenging to get my 4090s to consume more than 300 watts. There are also a lot of articles, benchmarks, etc around showing you can dramatically limit power while reducing perf by insignificant mounts (single digit %).
> which means you could build a 4gpu server from normal cases.

Only if you are already live near an airport and you are accustomed to the sounds of the lift off and flying away.