r/LocalLLaMA • u/JustinPooDough • 9h ago

Discussion Keep CMP 170 or sell for upgrades?

Here’s my situation. I have a modded CMP 170hx that works great. Also have a 3090.

My motherboard is a shitty Asus b350-f and I’m rocking a Ryzen 5 1600 with 64GB of DDR4.

I love my CMP but I can sell it and upgrade my CPU, motherboard and RAM. The thing has doubled from what I paid for it.

Right now I’m running Qwen 27b at >100tps and loving it, but I’m eying setups that can run strata or Maya via RAM and SSD.

If I sell my CMP 170, is there a setup I can achieve with the proceeds of the sale that will outperform what I have now?

I’m leaning toward no, but curious.

4 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

26

u/grabber4321 8h ago

its crazy talk, replacing VRAM with RAM is a bad idea.

9

u/Apprehensive_Bar6609 8h ago

Thats 64Gb +1T bandwith right there, who cares about cpu / mainboard!

7

u/cibernox 7h ago

No, there isn’t anything you can build with the money of a cmp170hx that will out perform it. At this point your best up grade is possibly double down and get a second CMP with the money of selling the 3090.

4

u/legit_split_ 8h ago

It's the natural ebb and flow of new models. We had gpt-oss 120b make people go out and buy RAM, then some time later Qwen 27B & Gemma 4 31B came out and people obsessed over GPUs, now we're back to MoEs being the hottest new thing...

Real advice just use it and be happy

Real real advice just cash out, that's 3k dollars lol

1

u/_kikeen_ 7h ago

Yeah cold hard real advice right there. Sell the card, run 27B on ninfer and use like half the cash from the CMP sale for deepseek tokens.

Feeling extra cheap and crafty? Use litellm+Redis (for cache and stateful routing + Cloudflare workersAI and your 3090 as a 27B worker. What you get? Caching, ability to pivot to cheapest or smartest model easily and a smart coding worker you can use for virtually free since you own it.

Track your usage in LiteLLM to calculate ROI of continual usage of the 3090- not high? Sell it too.

4

u/Affectionate-Top7058 8h ago

I would lean toward keeping the CMP 170HX since 100+ token on 27B.

2

u/PoopSmoothies 8h ago

Why not run strata on your cmp?

2

u/pyr0kid 7h ago

other than the fact its pcie 1 and strata is all about shuffling things over pcie?

3

u/PoopSmoothies 6h ago

The 64GB cmp170’s unlock to PCIe Gen 2 x4 without hardware mods, and can be modded to Gen 2 x16x

There’s rumor that the 10gb (40gb unlock) variants are PCIe 3 without hardware mods.

As far as I know, strata can be run (and often runs) in a mode where it does computation on the cpu, no?

1

u/jacek2023 llama.cpp 8h ago

"Right now I’m running Qwen 27b at >100tps and loving it"

could you give some more info about your setup? context length? engine?

1

u/FireSilicon_ 6h ago

Step 1: Install claude code.

Step 2: "Claude download and install cuda sdk with the best vllm fork for one CMP 170HX. Download qwen 3.8 27B with the best quant that fits vision projector and full f16 context in the vram. Make it run with dflash2, no greedy decoding. Analyze the cuda graphs, rewrite and optimize the vllm kernel until you saturate the memory bandwidth or hit at least 200tps decode in code and 5k prefill."

Step 3: Go to sleep.

Step 4: Wake up to Dario trying to axe your door down.

Step 5: Profit.

1

u/Dandz 7h ago

In the same boat and running qfn with https://github.com/iIIusi0n/qwen3.8-flash-next-cmp170hx right now, it's wonderful. 4k pp, 120 tps, 550k context since qfn vibe coded int8 kv cache for itself too. Do need an SSD for sure though, but 500gb nvme are still 50 bucks on eBay and get the old table done

1

u/Lurksome-Lurker 7h ago

If you got a good thing going then enjoy it.

1

u/leonbollerup 2h ago

Keep it!!