I suspect this might be due to MTP mispedictions. Either because the 3.8 quantized model weights do not include MTP heads, or as what happened with Ornith-1.5 recently, corrupted MTP heads, or due to a software issue in Ollama.
I can't find the post though.
Edit: a quick search from a server refurbisher nearby gives me a dual Xeon Gold 6330 28-core machine with 512GB and a 16GB V100 GPU. The memory is spread across 32 slots, for about £6,470.