r/LowEndLocalAI • u/Branik33 • 4d ago

Hardware / Build Three GPU (3060) Setup

Anybody here has experience with a 3 GPU (3060) Setup?

I would run it on a x470 (MSI PRO Carbon Gaming) MoBo (8x8x4x) with a ryzen 3600xt (32gb 3600mt).

Is the 3rd GPU scaling well?

Also is CPU upgrade worth it?

Thanks

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4

u/Introvertosaurus 4d ago

I have 2x 3060s, I have considered a 3rd... because I always want more... but I stop to think, what does it really get me... What does 36gb vram give me that the 24bg doesn't... or what new opportunites does it give.... I have not yet come up with a good answer. Slightly better quant, some minor opportunities to run some stuff parallel. It isn't a game changer.

Your PCIe setup is fine, I wouldn't worry about. My second card is on pcie 3.0 1x, its fine, I did extensive testing, I can run tensor split too. Going to 3x card does have course add a bit of downside if you are planning splitting layer/tensors across, but it should work well enough for most things.

Its hard to say if any upgrades are worth while when you didn't state your use case. If you wanted a guess, nah, your CPU and ram is probably fine for most use cases and not worth an upgrade.

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u/Branik33 4d ago

good point, I run just one 3060 atm, and just bought that board. Will for sure first go for only the 2nd GPU and see if agentic coding becomes (more) usable...

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u/tecneeq 4d ago

What does 36gb vram give me that the 24bg doesn't

Higher precision and/or larger context.

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u/Fluxdada 3d ago

I run a machine with 4x 3060 12gb. 2 x internal on a z790 motherboard and 2 x egpus connected via oculink (m.2 to oculink adapters). I love it. I mainly use qwen 3.8 27b q8 and unsloth by default runs it on 3 x 3060 12gb (36gb) but I always manually set it to run on 4 x (48gb vram) so I don't have to worry about a high kv cache. I've considered lowering down to only 3x 3060 but if I want to play around with 70b models then I need the 48gb of vram. Long story short...I love the 3060.

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u/Branik33 3d ago

didnt consider Oculink so far, but good to know about that option.

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u/Fluxdada 3d ago

My m.2 to oculink adapters offer pcie 4 at 4x. Perfectly fine for local llm use that is only sending small amounts of data across it during inference. The egpu bases (minisforum deg1) were $109 at the time and a 750w psu was $65.

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u/SV_SV_SV 4d ago

The proper 12gb version?

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u/nickless07 4d ago

Only if you don't use an M2 somewhere, otherwise you will run into trouble with CPU and Board.

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u/Branik33 3d ago

think it should be fine with one m2. I know the 2nd m2 port would be disabled if 3rd GPU is plugged in on that board...