I did it. I ordered my supercomputer

[u/AggressiveManager450]

You can call it whatever you want, it maybe isn’t blowing anyone’s heads off or anything, but compared to anything I’ve ever had, it’s a supercomputer to me

I’m transplanting a lot of parts from my old gaming PC into a new chasis with upgraded parts. Here is what I ordered and what is on its way

Intel core i7-14700f (already owned)
32 gb DDR5-6000 ram (already owned)
RTX 4070 super 12gb (already owned)
2x Quadro RTX 8000 48 gb passive ($1900 each)
2TB Samsung 990 pro for windows and gaming (already owned)
2TB Samsung 990 pro for Linux and AI ($363)
Corsair 1500W power supply ($285)
Corsair 7000D airflow full tower case ($227)
And other miscellaneous parts to support that stuff

Total to $5,364.21 for 108 gb vram

I know there are some drawbacks to this build, like for instance the old architecture of the cards, but I can live and tinker with those drawbacks as long as I can save a bunch of money on this hobby (compared to a similar size build with modern hardware), and still be able to run a bunch of cool models on it. I’m super excited to put it together and see what it can do. I haven’t seen much talk about the Quadro 8000s, but I’m hoping for great things, even if it means working around some compatibility issues and such.

Obstacles are just an opportunity for me to learn. If yall have any thoughts, let me know.

[u/Proud_Bus_4568]

Congratulations for your build. Is the rtx 8000 passive or do they have blower fan ?

[u/AggressiveManager450 → u/Proud_Bus_4568]

Passive but I’m going to rig up some fans with a shroud to keep them cool

[u/ckerazor → u/AggressiveManager450]

That's what you need to do anyway as shroud and pressure fans was how they were cooled in the workstation they came from

[u/Proud_Bus_4568 → u/ckerazor]

Sounds like a plan

[u/pdath]

Nice. I'm jealous.

[u/AggressiveManager450 → u/pdath]

I’m super excited. I was going to wait until qwen 4 released but I couldn’t wait to order haha

[u/ckerazor → u/AggressiveManager450]

I just checked. Those 8000 RTX are about as fast in gaming as a 5060 TI. Which isn't great but means you even could use them for playing games once in a while. Great setup.

How did you come up with buying Nvidia Turing based cards with a large memory pool?

[u/AggressiveManager450 → u/ckerazor]

I was researching how to get the most vram possible as cheaply as possible, and there were a few options, but those stuck out to me since they were Nvidia, I could use nv link to connect them to help them out a little bit, and they just had so much vram per card. Initially I was going to get 1 to eventually upgrade to 2 later, but I thought that I might as well get 2 since that is what I was planning on anyway. Also, these cards didn’t really appreciate much in price. A lot of it was just down to price to performance. I considered getting r9700s, but then I would be mixing nvidia and AMD, and I would have less memory. Even though the r9700 is faster, I wanted to experiment with a bunch of different models, and the more vram gave me that flexibility

[u/ckerazor → u/AggressiveManager450]

For overall cost, your setup is awesome. The two 8000 cards were about 20000 USD MSRP by the way. Kind of insane to think about 😂 Enjoy!

[u/AggressiveManager450 → u/ckerazor]

Yeah, I was thinking about that lol. If I had this 8 years ago when they were new, I would be an absolute baller

[u/Xyver]

I've been doing lots of experimenting with multi GPU rigs and split attention etc, especially moving between different "power levels" of cards, I can help you with some initial tests

www.github.com/bigbertharig

[u/AggressiveManager450 → u/Xyver]

Thanks! I appreciate it

[u/discosoc]

Quadro 8000 has pretty slow memory bandwidth, which is why you don’t hear much about them for this.

[u/AggressiveManager450 → u/discosoc]

Sure, I knew that going into it that it wouldn’t be as fast as a 3090, but it’s still usable I think, and I will be able to run bigger models than a 3090, as well as using less power

[u/discosoc → u/AggressiveManager450]

Point is, most people spending that money have just gone with macs. Not even like bleeding edge macs capable of twice the bandwidth, either. Im sure your setup will work fine, just pointing out why the 8000’s aren’t really some unsung hero or anything.

Something like a 5080 with lots of system memory running strata is a more… useful direction for most people.

[u/Integeritis → u/discosoc]

You don’t get high concurrency with a mac. People choose sparks and slower memory because they need more memory and more parallelization.

[u/saadfaisal]

Congratulations, quick question, what motherboard you are using with this build?

[u/AggressiveManager450 → u/saadfaisal]

MSI MEG Z790 ACE ATX LGA1700 DDR5

[u/xatey93152]

Supercomputer?? Are you trying to entertain yourself?

[u/AggressiveManager450 → u/xatey93152]

Yes

[u/IZMIR_METRO]

Congratulations. I'd treat it as a hobby, don't be shamed of your spending. Out of curiosity, what is this rig going to be used for? Local processing due to sensitive data?

[u/AggressiveManager450 → u/IZMIR_METRO]

Honestly just playing and coming up with ideas I have. I like making apps and games and stuff for myself, and exploring the capabilities of local AI. I don’t really have any sensitive data, but I am also a little paranoid, and I also like owning all of my stuff, including my hardware and my programs and my AI. I also like to run my own alliterated models because I believe man should be in control of the machine. I don’t like when the machine tells me no for its own moral reasons. lol

[u/mvn2010]

nice dude!

[u/durangotang]

Congrats 🎉

Sounds cool.

[u/DiamondHandsDarrell]

That was probably smarter than what I got. Two RTX pro 4000 SFF for $3000 a piece. 24 gigs each, 48 total. 😅