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Comment by alexhutcheson | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia’s workstation cards are available with more RAM than the consumer cards, at a lower price than the datacenter cards. RTX 6000 Ada has 48 GB VRAM and retails for $6800, and RTX 5000 Ada has 32 GB VRAM and retails for $4000[1].

Very large models have to be distributed across multiple GPUs though, even if you’re using datacenter chips like H100s.

[1] https://store.nvidia.com/en-us/nvidia-rtx/store/

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Other than power consumption, is there any reason to prefer a single workstation card over multiple consumer cards then?

A single $6800 RTX 6000 Ada with 48GB of VRAM vs 6x 7900XTX with a combined total of 144GB of VRAM honestly makes this seem like a no brainer to me.

You have to pass the context between GPUs for large models that don't fit in VRAM. Often ends up slower. Also, tooling around AMD GPUs is still poor in comparison.

You can only fit 1-2 graphics cards in a “normal” ATX case (each card takes 2-3 “slots”). If you want 4 cards on one machine, you need a bigger/more expensive motherboard, case, PSU, etc. I haven’t personally seen anyone put 6 cards in a workstation.

In a water cooled config the cards only take 1 slot. I’ve got 2 3090s and am buying another two shortly. Preemtively upgraded the power to 220v, found a 2kw PSU, and installed a dedicated mini split. I’m also undervolting the cards to keep power and heat down, because even 2000w is not enough to run 4 and a server grade CPU without tripping. When you start accumulating GPUs you also run into all kinds of thermal and power problems for the room, too.

This is impressive.

I was fortunate enough to scoop up a bunch of Gigabyte RTX 3090 Turbos. Cheap used eight slot SuperMicro (or whatever), a cabling kit, four 3090s, boot.

Those were the days!

Sincere question: Is installing and running a mini split actually cheaper than racking them in a colo, or paying for time on one of the GPU cloud providers?

Regardless, I can understand the hobby value of running that kind of rig at home.

I personally haven’t done the calculation. I have rented colo space before and they are usually quite stingy on power. The other issue is, there’s a certain element to having GPUs around 24/7/365 to play with that I feel is fundamentally different than running it on a Cloud Provider. You’re not stressing out about every hour it’s running. I think in the long run (2yr+) it will be cheaper, and then you can swap in the latest and greatest GPU without any additional infrastructure cost.

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