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Comment by lawn | Hacker News Reader

Why buy this instead of building your own setup with X 4090s?

I think he mentions this in the podcast. One of the challenging problems they're attempting to tackle is enabling the build to work with standard 120 volt wall sockets. He mentions throttling the system (GPUs specifically) to use less power at cost to performance.

That and setting up the software to work w/ an array of GPUs rather than one seems difficult.

I don't know if he actually said this, but power limits on gpus do work. I've been limiting my gpu to about 60% max power during long AI workloads and I lost about 10% of performance. A 40% reduction in power usage seems worthwhile.

It probably depends on your gpu though.

Undervolting would probably be even better.

same here with the 3090 I use. Power limited to 60% and I barely notice a difference when experimenting around with AI or playing games. Really good to use in a SFF PC

What OS/software are you using to throttle the cards? I'm interested in doing this on Arch

    ~ > sudo nvidia-smi -pl 300
    Power limit for GPU 00000000:09:00.0 was set to 300.00 W from 450.00 W.

You got the Arch solution. For anyone else on windows: you can just use MSI Afterburner (regardless what you have an MSI card or not).

144GB Vram vs 48?

And once you buy 6 4090s for 6x24=144, and add the other components, you are not that far off from 15k. The 4090s are still a bit cheaper and with a more standard setup, but it's close enough to consider the alternative.

Good luck running that on 1600W and keeping it cool.

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