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by JKCalhoun 378 days ago
Someone posted that they had used a "mining rig" [0] from AliExpress for less than $100. It even has RAM and a CPU. He picked up a 2000W (!) DELL server PS for cheap off eBay. The GPUs were NVIDIA TESLAs (M40 for example) since they often have a lot of RAM and are less expensive.

I followed in those footsteps to create my own [1] (photo [2]).

I picked up a 24GB M40 for around $300 off eBay. I 3D printed a "cowl" for the GPU that I found online and picked up two small fans from Amazon that got int he cowl. Attached the cowl + fans keep the GPU cool. (These TESLA server GPUs have no fan since they're expected to live in one of those wind-tunnels called a server rack).

I bought the same cheap DELL server PS that the original person had used and I also had to get a break-out board (and power-supply cables and adapters) for the GPU.

Thanks to LLMs, I was able to successfully install Rocky Linux as well as CUDA and NVIDIA drivers. I SSH into it and run ollama commands.

My own hurdle at this point is: I have a 2nd 24 GB M40 TESLA but when installed on the motherboard, Linux will not boot. LLMs are helping me try to set up BIOS correctly or otherwise determine what the issue is. (We'll see.) I would love to get to 48 GB.

[0] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806580127486.html

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/engineersneedart.com/post/3lmg4kiz4...

[2] https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:oxjqlam...

3 comments

There was an article on Tom's Hardware recently where someone was using a CPU cooler with a GPU [1].

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/crazed-modde...

My first guess would be to change the Above 4G decoding setting but depending upon how old the motherboard is it may not have that setting.
I had an old Tesla M40 12 GB lying around and figured I’d try it out with some 8-13B llms, but was disappointed to find that it’s around the same speed as my mac mini m2. I suppose the mac mini is a 10 years newer chip, but it’s crazy that mobile today matches data center from 10 years ago