This is the story of how I bought enterprise-grade AI hardware designed for liquid-cooled server racks that was converted to air cooling, and then back again, survived multiple near-disasters (including GPUs reporting temperatures of 16 million degrees), and ended up with a desktop that can run 235B parameter models at home. It’s a tale of questionable decisions, creative problem-solving, and what happens when you try to turn datacenter equipment into a daily driver.
# Tell the driver to completely ignore the NVLINK and it should allow the GPUs to initialise independently over PCIe !!!! This took a week of work to find, thanks Reddit!
I needed this info, thanks for putting it up. Can this really be an issue for every data center?
I recently had a similar experience, although not this size.
Pre-story:
For 3 years I wanted to build a rack-gaming-server, so I can play with my son in our small apartment where we don't have enough space for a gaming computer (wife also doesn't allow it). I have a stable IPsec connection to my parents house, where I have a powerfull PV plant (90kWp) and a rack server, for my freelance job.
Fast forward to 2 months ago, I see a Supermicro SYS-7049GP-TRT for 1400€ on Ebay. It looks clean, sold by some IT reuse-warehouse. No desription, just 3 photos and the case label. I ask the seller whether he knows whats in it and he says he didn't check. The case alone comes new at 3k here in Germany. I buy it.
It arrives. 64GB ECC memory, 2x Xeon silver, 1x 500GB SSD, 5x GBit LAN Cards. Dual 2200 Watt PowerSupply. I remove the airshroud, and: A Nvidia V100S 32GB emerges. I sell the card on ebay for 1600€ and buy 2x Xeon 6254 CPUs (100€ each) to replace the 2x Silver ones that are in it. Last week, I bought two Blackwell RTX 4000 Pro for 1100€ each. Enough for gaming with my son! (and I can do some fun with LLMs and home assistant/smart home..)
The case fits 4x dual-size GPUs, so I could fit 4x RTX 6000 in it (384GB VRAM). At a price of 3k, this would come at 12k (still too much for me.. but let's check back in a couple of years..).
Buying used enterprise gear is fun. I had so many good experiences and this stuff is just rock solid.
Love how a €7.5k 20 kilogram server is placed on a €5 particleboard table. I have owned several LACKs but would never put anything valuable on it. IKEA rates them at 25 kilogram maximum load.
LACK tables specifically are well proven to be quite sturdy actually. They happen to be just the right width for servers / network devices, and so people have used them for that purpose for ages. Search for "LACK rack", or see e.g. https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack. 20kg is nothing; I've personally put >100kg on top.
Oh no, thats not right. 20 Kg was in the original server case. With the Aluminium frames, and glass panel, its more like 40 Kg now... Shit, maybe I should take it off the Lack table...
What an incredible barn-find type story. Incredible. And you are among very few buyers who could have so lovingly done such an incredible job debugging driver & motherboard issues. Please add a kitsch Serial Experiment Lain themed computing shrine around this incredible work, and all's done.
> 4x Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420 (B-Ware) - €180
Quite aside, but man: I fricking love Arctic. Seeing their fans in the new Corsi-Rosenthal boxes has been awesome. Such good value. I've been sing a Liquid Freeze II after nearly buying my last air-cooled heat-sink & seeing the LF-II onsale for <$75. Buy.
Please give us some power consumption figures! I'm so curious how it scales up and down. Do different models take similar or different power? Asking a lot, but it'd be so neat to see a somewhat high res view (>1 sample/s) of power consumption (watts) on these things, such a unique opportunity.
Huge fan of those AIOs as well! I have LFIII 420mm in my PC and I've successfully built a 10x10cm cloud chamber with another one which is really pushing it as far as it can go.
Serious question: does this thing actually make games run really great? Or are they so optimized for AI/ML workloads that they either don’t work or run normal video games poorly?
Also:
> I arrived at a farmhouse in a small forest…
Were you not worried you were going to get murdered?
It was fun when the seller told me to come and look in the back of his dirty white van, because "the servers are in here". This was before I had seen the workshop etc.
I believe these gpus dont have direct hdmi/DisplayPort outputs, so at the very least its tricky to even run a game on them, I guess you need to run the game in a VM or so?
I think the point of negative returns for gaming is going above the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell + AMD 9800X3D CPU + latency optimized RAM + any decent NVMe drive. Seems to net ~1.1x more performance than a normal 5090 in the same setup (and both can be overclocked about equally). Aside from what the GPU is optimized for, the CPU in these servers being ARM based ends up adding more overhead for games (and breaks DRM) which still assume x86 on Windows/Linux.
> does this thing actually make games run really great
It's an interesting question, and since OP indicates he previously had a 4090, he's qualified to reply and hopefully will. However, I suspect the GH200 won't turn out to run games much faster than a 5090 because A) Games aren't designed to exploit the increased capabilities of this hardware, and B) The GH200 drivers wouldn't be tuned for game performance. One of the biggest differences of datacenter AI GPUs is the sheer memory size, and there's little reason for a game to assume there's more than 16GB of video memory available.
More broadly, this is a question that, for the past couple decades, I'd have been very interested in. For a lot of years, looking at today's most esoteric, expensive state-of-the-art was the best way to predict what tomorrow's consumer desktop might be capable of. However, these days I'm surprised to find myself no longer fascinated by this. Having been riveted by the constant march of real-time computer graphics from the 90s to 2020 (including attending many Siggraph conferences in the 90s and 00s), I think we're now nearing the end of truly significant progress in consumer gaming graphics.
I do realize that's a controversial statement, and sure there will always be a way to throw more polys, bigger textures and heavier algorithms at any game, but... each increasing increment just doesn't matter as much as it once did. For typical desktop and couch consumer gaming, the upgrade from 20fps to 60fps was a lot more meaningful to most people than 120fps to 360fps. With synthetic frame and pixel generation, increasing resolution beyond native 4K matters less. (Note: head-mounted AR/VR might one of the few places 'moar pixels' really matters in the future). Sure, it can look a bit sharper, a bit more varied and the shadows can have more perfect ray-traced fall-off, but at this point piling on even more of those technically impressive feats of CGI doesn't make the game more fun to play, whether on a 75" TV at 8 feet or a 34-inch monitor at two feet. As an old-school computer graphics guy, it's incredible to be see real-time path tracing adding subtle colors to shadows from light reflections bouncing off colored walls. It's living in the sci-fi future we dreamed of at Siggraph '92. But as a gamer looking for some fun tonight, honestly... the improved visuals don't contribute much to the overall gameplay between a 3070, 4070 and 5070.
While this is undoubtably still an excellent deal, the comparison to the new price of H100 is a bit misleading, since today you can buy a new, legit RTX 6000 Pro for about $7-8k, and get similar performance the first two of the models tested at least. As a bonus those can fit in a regular workstation or server, and you can buy multiple. This thing is not worth $80k in the same way that any old enterprise equipment is not worth nearly as much as its price when it was new.
Fair points, but the deal is still great because of the nuances of the RAM/VRAM.
The Blackwells are superior on paper, but there's some "Nvidia Math" involved: When they report performance in press announcements, they don't usually mention the precision. Yes, the Blackwells are more than double the speed of the Hopper H100's, but thats comparing FP8 to FP4 (the H100's can't do native FP4). Yes, thats great for certain workloads, but not the majority.
What's more interesting is the VRAM speed. The 6000 Pro has 96 GB of GPU memory and 1.8 TB/s bandwidth, the H100 haas the same amount, but with HBM3 at 4.9 TB/s. That 2.5X increase is very influential in the overall performance of the system.
Lastly, if it works, the NVLink-C2C does 900 GB/s of bandwidth between the cards, so about 5x what a pair of 6000 Pros could do over PCIE5. Big LLMs need well over the 96 GB on a single card, so this becomes the bottleneck.
you do realize he has 2 H100s, you would need to buy 2 RTX 6000 Pro for $15-$16k plus the hardware. The ram that came with that hardware is worth more than $7000 now.
Wow! As others have said, deal of the century!! As a side note, a few years back, I used to scrape eBay for Intel QS Xeon and quite a few times managed to snag incredible deals, but this is beyond anything anyone has ever achieved!
That was enjoyable. I miss the days when I would buy old pieces, or find some in old dumpsters in Sao Paulo and try to use old video cards and memory modules to create little franksteins (a lot cheaper than this, but still fun).
I found interesting to learn there are businesses around converting used servers into desktops. Sounds like a good initiative to avoid some e-waste (assuming the desktops are easy to maintain).
Wow! Kudos for thinking it was possible and making it happen. I was wondering how long it would be before big local models were possible under 10k—pretty impressive. Qwen3-235B can do mundane chat, coding, and agentic tasks pretty well.
I feel like it's going to be a long long time before we get a repeat of something like this. And David did such an incredible job on this. Custom designed frame, designed his own water-block! Wildly great effort here.
I think there are probably Law Firms/doctors offices that would gladly pay ~3-4K euro a month to have this thing delivered and run truely "on-prem" to work with documents they can't risk leaking (patent filings, patient records etc).
For a company with 20-30 people, the legal and privacy protection is worth the small premium over using cloud providers.
Just a hunch though! This would have it paid-off in 3-4 months?
Maybe the title could be I bought an Nvidia server.....
to avoid confusion that it's something to do with Grace Hopper the person, and her servers ...or mainframes?
dnhkng|2 months ago
amirhirsch|2 months ago
I needed this info, thanks for putting it up. Can this really be an issue for every data center?
ipsum2|2 months ago
pointbob|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
dauertewigkeit|2 months ago
How does the seller get these desktops directly from NVIDIA?
And if the seller's business is custom made desktop boxes, why didn't he just fit the two H100s into a better desktop box?
ProAm|2 months ago
baud147258|2 months ago
jerome-jh|2 months ago
Fire-Dragon-DoL|2 months ago
Helmut10001|2 months ago
Pre-story: For 3 years I wanted to build a rack-gaming-server, so I can play with my son in our small apartment where we don't have enough space for a gaming computer (wife also doesn't allow it). I have a stable IPsec connection to my parents house, where I have a powerfull PV plant (90kWp) and a rack server, for my freelance job.
Fast forward to 2 months ago, I see a Supermicro SYS-7049GP-TRT for 1400€ on Ebay. It looks clean, sold by some IT reuse-warehouse. No desription, just 3 photos and the case label. I ask the seller whether he knows whats in it and he says he didn't check. The case alone comes new at 3k here in Germany. I buy it.
It arrives. 64GB ECC memory, 2x Xeon silver, 1x 500GB SSD, 5x GBit LAN Cards. Dual 2200 Watt PowerSupply. I remove the airshroud, and: A Nvidia V100S 32GB emerges. I sell the card on ebay for 1600€ and buy 2x Xeon 6254 CPUs (100€ each) to replace the 2x Silver ones that are in it. Last week, I bought two Blackwell RTX 4000 Pro for 1100€ each. Enough for gaming with my son! (and I can do some fun with LLMs and home assistant/smart home..)
The case fits 4x dual-size GPUs, so I could fit 4x RTX 6000 in it (384GB VRAM). At a price of 3k, this would come at 12k (still too much for me.. but let's check back in a couple of years..).
Buying used enterprise gear is fun. I had so many good experiences and this stuff is just rock solid.
systemtest|2 months ago
Ao7bei3s|2 months ago
dnhkng|2 months ago
ivanjermakov|2 months ago
jauntywundrkind|2 months ago
> 4x Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420 (B-Ware) - €180
Quite aside, but man: I fricking love Arctic. Seeing their fans in the new Corsi-Rosenthal boxes has been awesome. Such good value. I've been sing a Liquid Freeze II after nearly buying my last air-cooled heat-sink & seeing the LF-II onsale for <$75. Buy.
Please give us some power consumption figures! I'm so curious how it scales up and down. Do different models take similar or different power? Asking a lot, but it'd be so neat to see a somewhat high res view (>1 sample/s) of power consumption (watts) on these things, such a unique opportunity.
Tenemo|2 months ago
djoldman|2 months ago
> # Data Center/HGX-Series/HGX H100/Linux aarch64/12.8 seem to work! wget https://us.download.nvidia.com/tesla/570.195.03/NVIDIA-Linux...
> ...
Nothing makes you feel more "I've been there" than typing inscrutable arcana to get a GPU working for ML work...
skizm|2 months ago
Also:
> I arrived at a farmhouse in a small forest…
Were you not worried you were going to get murdered?
dnhkng|2 months ago
jaggirs|2 months ago
zamadatix|2 months ago
Havoc|2 months ago
LTT tried it in one of their videos...forgot which card but one of the serious nvidia AI cards.
...it runs like shit for gaming workloads. It does the job but comfortably beaten by a mid tier consumer card for 1/10th the price
Their AI track datacenter cards are definitely not same thing different badge glued on
fsckboy|2 months ago
he had left a trail of breadcrumbs. although he was hungry, it seemed a prudent precaution.
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
mrandish|2 months ago
It's an interesting question, and since OP indicates he previously had a 4090, he's qualified to reply and hopefully will. However, I suspect the GH200 won't turn out to run games much faster than a 5090 because A) Games aren't designed to exploit the increased capabilities of this hardware, and B) The GH200 drivers wouldn't be tuned for game performance. One of the biggest differences of datacenter AI GPUs is the sheer memory size, and there's little reason for a game to assume there's more than 16GB of video memory available.
More broadly, this is a question that, for the past couple decades, I'd have been very interested in. For a lot of years, looking at today's most esoteric, expensive state-of-the-art was the best way to predict what tomorrow's consumer desktop might be capable of. However, these days I'm surprised to find myself no longer fascinated by this. Having been riveted by the constant march of real-time computer graphics from the 90s to 2020 (including attending many Siggraph conferences in the 90s and 00s), I think we're now nearing the end of truly significant progress in consumer gaming graphics.
I do realize that's a controversial statement, and sure there will always be a way to throw more polys, bigger textures and heavier algorithms at any game, but... each increasing increment just doesn't matter as much as it once did. For typical desktop and couch consumer gaming, the upgrade from 20fps to 60fps was a lot more meaningful to most people than 120fps to 360fps. With synthetic frame and pixel generation, increasing resolution beyond native 4K matters less. (Note: head-mounted AR/VR might one of the few places 'moar pixels' really matters in the future). Sure, it can look a bit sharper, a bit more varied and the shadows can have more perfect ray-traced fall-off, but at this point piling on even more of those technically impressive feats of CGI doesn't make the game more fun to play, whether on a 75" TV at 8 feet or a 34-inch monitor at two feet. As an old-school computer graphics guy, it's incredible to be see real-time path tracing adding subtle colors to shadows from light reflections bouncing off colored walls. It's living in the sci-fi future we dreamed of at Siggraph '92. But as a gamer looking for some fun tonight, honestly... the improved visuals don't contribute much to the overall gameplay between a 3070, 4070 and 5070.
crapple8430|2 months ago
dnhkng|2 months ago
The Blackwells are superior on paper, but there's some "Nvidia Math" involved: When they report performance in press announcements, they don't usually mention the precision. Yes, the Blackwells are more than double the speed of the Hopper H100's, but thats comparing FP8 to FP4 (the H100's can't do native FP4). Yes, thats great for certain workloads, but not the majority.
What's more interesting is the VRAM speed. The 6000 Pro has 96 GB of GPU memory and 1.8 TB/s bandwidth, the H100 haas the same amount, but with HBM3 at 4.9 TB/s. That 2.5X increase is very influential in the overall performance of the system.
Lastly, if it works, the NVLink-C2C does 900 GB/s of bandwidth between the cards, so about 5x what a pair of 6000 Pros could do over PCIE5. Big LLMs need well over the 96 GB on a single card, so this becomes the bottleneck.
e.g. Here are benchmarks on the RTX 6000 pro using the GPT-OSS-120B model, where it generates 145 tokens/sec, and I get 195 tokens/sec on the GH200. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mm7azs/openai_...
GPTshop|2 months ago
segmondy|2 months ago
fuzzythinker|2 months ago
Good one
volf_|2 months ago
These are the best kinds of posts
BizarroLand|2 months ago
Beijinger|2 months ago
Most of them are in California? Anything in NY/NJ
bombcar|2 months ago
There should be some all over the country.
m4r1k|2 months ago
kinow|2 months ago
I found interesting to learn there are businesses around converting used servers into desktops. Sounds like a good initiative to avoid some e-waste (assuming the desktops are easy to maintain).
mrose11|2 months ago
ycwatcher|2 months ago
dnhkng|2 months ago
tigranbs|2 months ago
fnands|2 months ago
Nice find, and I admire your courage for even attempting this!
rurban|2 months ago
You really need a special server cabinet and HVAC for these kind of beasts. But you've need them for training, right
Frannky|2 months ago
jauntywundrkind|2 months ago
We'll see how it goes, but what _is_ happening is ram replacement. Nvidia 5090's with 96GB are somewhat a thing now. $4K. YMMV, caveat emptor. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Newest-RTX-5090-96gb-...
MLgulabio|2 months ago
Lets continue to hope
albertgoeswoof|2 months ago
How long would it take to recoup the cost if you made the model available for others to run inference at the same price as the big players?
kingstnap|2 months ago
Assumptions:
Batch 4x and get 400 tokens per second and push his power consumption to 900W instead of the underutilized 300W.
Electricity around €0.2/kWhr.
Tokens valued at €1/1M out.
Assume ~70% utilization.
Result:
You get ~1M tokens per hour which is a net profit of ~€0.8/hr. Which is a payoff time of a bit over a year or so given the €9K investment.
Honestly though there is a lot of handwaving here. The most significant unknown is getting high utilization with aggressive batching and 24/7 load.
Also the demand for privacy can make the utility of the tokens much higher than typical API prices for open source models.
In a sort of orthogonal way renting 2 H100s costs around $6 per hour which makes the payback time a bit over a couple months.
dnhkng|2 months ago
I think there are probably Law Firms/doctors offices that would gladly pay ~3-4K euro a month to have this thing delivered and run truely "on-prem" to work with documents they can't risk leaking (patent filings, patient records etc).
For a company with 20-30 people, the legal and privacy protection is worth the small premium over using cloud providers.
Just a hunch though! This would have it paid-off in 3-4 months?
hollow-moe|2 months ago
rcarmo|2 months ago
DANmode|2 months ago
arein3|2 months ago
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
20after4|2 months ago
zkmon|2 months ago
ionwake|2 months ago
Philpax|2 months ago
danr4|2 months ago
KellyCriterion|2 months ago
SCNR
pointbob|2 months ago
pointbob|2 months ago
dnhkng|2 months ago
ChrisArchitect|2 months ago
dnhkng|2 months ago
walrus01|2 months ago
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-m&q=grace%20h...