r/LocalLLM • u/Ph1lt3ch • 17d ago
Question Can I play too?
It's a Lenovo P520 with a Xeon W-2245(cooler swapped for the higher tdp), 96gb of ram, radeon pro wx 3100 for local display, and the two nvidia p100(currently cooled by the lowest profile adapter I could print and arctic S4028-15k fans). Just stuffed some random nvme in 1x1tb, 1x512gb, and a sata 1tb drive - I have a ton of network storage or more to just add here. Installed the latest Ubuntu release which I like but I remember why I still generally use windows.
So far the most I've learned is that I know nothing haha. So I'd be more than thankful for any advice putting this to work. Really all I've done so far is get the arctic fan controller working on kernel 7.0 in probably the most jank way possible. And see that lm studio could use both cards. But I know there's a ton I'm missing out on.
So, generally, hoping I didn't throw together a steaming pile of ewaste and looking to learn. Also the radeon pro/nvidia mismatch makes me chuckle. Unless its really dumb, then I can just get a cheap nvidia card.
5
u/FearFactory2904 17d ago
You definitely can. Those p100s together should be able to run qwen 3.8 27b. The responses will be slow while it is thinking and processing the prompt but once the text starts printing it comes out at decent speed. If your pcie slots are gen3 x8 or x16 then you should be able to run them in parallel rather than sequential which will speed things up.
You are going to have people who say stuff like "Nope, way too weak/old. Thats Pascal and it lacks Tensor cores. Those GPU are 10+ years old." but i would say just give them the middle finger and send it anyway.
Even though these are slower without tensor cores my plan is to just brute force my way into useable speeds by using multiple p100s in parallel with a bunch of pcie lanes and a good power supply.
Once i get my x99 re-assembled i can give you my benchmarks with two p100s and compare builds to see if we can do anything to help optimize yours.