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by SillyUsername 16 days ago
No mention of the venerable Tesla P4. 75W peak, 8GB VRAM, about $80 (£60).

I have 6x P4s, a Xeon E5 2696v3 (36 threads, 3.8ghz peak but all core turbo unlocked, so 6 cores at 3.8Ghz - about 8 cores at 3.5ghz, or all cores at 3.1ghz), 48GB DDR4, all fit into a micro atx case running on a 650W MSI psu. This gives me a virtual 48GB GPU (llama.cpp ftw) to backup that 48GB of RAM.

I typically see scores of at least 7-12t/s on 20-30B Q4KM size dense models, on a 32K/48K/64K context, adequate for modern inference.

The pain point is the prompt loading, it is far far slower, minutes not seconds, than modern tensor core 8GB 5060s (my other machine's 2x GPUs) but is quite similar in regular inference speed once it has loaded.

4 comments

That’s cool but 7 - 12 tps is frustrating for anything interactive.
It's minimal kind of speed but for the price I feel it's quite good. Smaller models fly as you'd expect, but the fact it can load these mid range models into something that is dirt cheap is generally a win imho.
Yes! P4 and the other small cards are fantastic. I've been more focused on developing a cooling system around the 2 slot sized cards so I don't have any of these lying around. Are you using P4 for anything outside of LLM work? I'm interested in seeing their image processing capabilities.
Not really, I did consider some mining, just to see what the fuss was but probably wouldn't even break even.
How the hell did you fit 6 P4s in a mATX case?
Took off the bezels, compressed 4 into a block, had a rigid bifurcation card link GPUs 1 and 3 on top, another underneath the block do 2 and 4.

Then I fitted my own custom 40x40x30 fan shroud for 2x6000 rpm fans at one end.

The other 2 I did something similar for but a single 2 card block and a stock fan shroud online.

Oh and also side mounted a 4GB 750Ti for graphics, and/or whisper use, parallel to the mainboard. Airflow from the front fans to back is unimpeded by anything in this way.
> about $80 (£60)

Man, I wish I lived where you guys lived.

Same, and hope I can afford that w/$ $/t, 650w is wild to run here24/7 , would cost me 32% of my salary
It typically runs 120W idling, and 450W peak. Not great power efficiency wise, but I have a Cron midnight shutdown and and S5 bios event powering it up on a morning (I could use wake on Lan but didn't see the point).
(650/1000)(24*30)=468 kWh.

That would cost me about $70/month ($0.15/kWh) or someone in California about $234/month ($0.50/kWh).

Do you pay $1/kWh and make ~$1500/month or something? I can’t make the math work for your case.

Yeah, that number doesn't align with the eBay listings I'm seeing. Perhaps the mere publication of this article has caused them all to sell out.
It was AliExpress, during sales, earlier this year, with discounts from playing games. I typically used to see much higher eBay prices. A bit of hyperbole tbh, not everyone has the patience to do this but I was honest that this is what I got them for. The DDR shortage has pushed the current price up to $130 (?) or >£85 after all discounts now.