[dnhkng]

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.

[amirhirsch]

# 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?

[Tinyyy]

Doesn’t this prevent the GPUs from talking to each other over the high speed link?

[ipsum2]

I saw the same post on Reddit and was so tempted to purchase it, but I live in the US. Cool to see it wasn't a scam!

[GPTshop]

We can get around tariffs, if that is your concern.

[pointbob]

Loved it. You are mgyver. You should post more stuff on Twitter. Thanks for the story.

[dnhkng]

lol, I tried posting stuff on Twitter, but never got any traction. This might be too nerdy for that crowd?

[dauertewigkeit]

It's a very interesting read, but a lot is not clear.

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?

[Ntrails]

> why didn't he just fit the two H100s into a better desktop box?

I expect because they were no longer in the sort of condition to sell as new machines? They were clearly well used and selling "as seen" is the lowest reputational risk associated with offload

[dnhkng]

These are on a custom board from Nvidia, so its not possible to separate them. I think the seller usually gets H100's and them into a custom case, with a PCIE adapter to the server GPUs.

This thing too unwieldy to make into a desktop (you can see how much effort it took), and was in pretty bad condition. I think he just wanted to get rid of it without having to deal with returns. I took a bet on it, and was lucky it paid out.

[GPTshop]

We build these desktops from Nvidia servers we buy from reputable manufacturers like Pegatron, Gigabyte, Asrock Rack, and many more.

H100 PCI and GH200 are two very different things. The advantages of Grace Hopper are much higher connections speeds, bandwidth and lower power consumption.

[ProAm]

Which is how you learn to become an expert. I love it

[baud147258]

When you said you paid cash, you paid all ~7.5k€ in paper money? How do you get that much cash out of your bank?

[devilbunny]

Presumably by going there, showing your ID, and withdrawing it? They might make you wait a day to have that much on hand, but not more than that.

[dnhkng]

Sure, its a free country! (I'm Australian, living in Germany).

[jerome-jh]

Securing soldered components with epoxy? You have to be very confident at your soldering :) You had no hot glue?

[dnhkng]

I've had a bit of practice, but I don't have the right gear for this level of soldering. It took maybe an hour to solder in 2 components, after many failed attempts. Persistence beats intelligence?

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

Did it behave like a star at 16 million degrees? Lol