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The rig was discovered in a “damp garage” the seller had purchased years earlier, then listed on Avito, a Russian classifieds site. The OP had concerns about whether or not the rig would work and offered to test it and pay more if it functioned, but the seller refused, and the price was negotiated down without a test. The cost was low enough to take the risk, the buyer said. Even in the case the rig worked, performance was imbalanced, as the main system has a weak Celeron CPU with very little system memory.
The setup was originally intended for crypto mining with specialized Nvidia P106-100 GPUs, Pascal-generation cards with 6GB of GDDR5 each that OP calls “basically gtx 1060 6gb.” Gigabyte’s P106-100, for reference, has 8,008 MHz memory with a 192-bit bus width for about 192 GB/s per card. The hardware was originally introduced around the middle of 2017. The cards are no longer entirely supported as CUDA 13.0 removed offline compilation for GPUs below compute capability 7.5, which includes Pascal GPUs, and driver branch 580 is “the final [one] that supports GPUs before CC 7.5,” Nvidia says on its developer blog. Security updates are supported through October 2028 , however.
The first test was a mixture-of-experts model using Alibaba’s Qwen with “35B [parameters] in total and 3B activated,” per Qwen’s model card on Hugging Face; it’s roughly a 24GB download. The initial test had it at “30+ tokens a second” in Ollama but it can probably operate faster “with mtp and some optimizations,” OP says, referring to multi-token prediction.
Another user stated that such performance was possible on a CPU alone, to which OP replied, “On a 35$ device without any optimizations?” A dense, non-MoE model such as Qwen3.8-27B is unlikely to run as well, but “It should run any MoE model that fits entirely into VRAM decently well.” Performance is also expected to be limited by the PCIe 2.0 x1 motherboard slots.
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/reddit-user-pays-usd35-for-a-crypto-mining-rig-left-in-a-garage-and-gets-54gb-of-vram-at-65-cents-per-gb-the-first-test-for-2017-era-gpus-a-35b-parameter-ai-model-running-locally-at-over-30-tokens-per-second#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.