Posted by apwheele 3 days ago
Genuine question; would anyone here recommend any specific motherboard to best utilize these cards?
I myself run with gigabyte trx40 aorus xtreme, but since it's regular threadripper (not pro) with 4 GPUs 2 of them will run at x16 and two of them at x8 speeds
The Ada has a memory bandwidth of 960GB/s. The Pro has 1.8TB/s and about 40-50% better performance so is at least equivalent in processing power, much better in memory bandwidth (important for inference) and can hold larger models on a single card.
I've considered buying a rig with 1-2 6000 Pros for similar reasons but I want to see what happens with this year's Mac Studios with a likely M5 Ultra. Macs have a shared memory architecture whereas NVidia segments the market based on max memory where the biggest consumer card (RTX 5090) has 32GB of VRAM but still excellent memory bandwidth (1.8TB/s). A RTX 5090 rig will still trounce a Mac Studio seems to be the conventional wisdom. Despite being able to hold larger models and being able to chain Mac Studios on TB5, their lower memory bandwidth (~900GB/s) and lower overall GFLOPS mean they still come out behind.
That being said, the current Mac Studios are relatively long in the tooth, being released in 2024.
I'm still not sure any of this is really wroth it because things are still changing so fast. I think there's a decent chance of a number of large AI companies going bust in the next 2-3 years such that you'll be able to buy enterprise AI hardware at cents on the dollar, a bit like how Google bought data centers in the post-dot-com crash.
But anyway, nowadays I'd be looking at the RTX 6000 Pro as the sweet spot, having anywhere from 1-4 in a single server.
The electricial issues the author mentions are interesting. I hadn't really thought about the max amperage on a residential circuit. In a DC, these would typically operate on three phase power and much higher overall amperage. I wonder if there's a device you can buy that can combine multiple residential circuits into a single power source for a server this power hungry?
I don't think anything compares to the nVidia chips at all.
Is this the best general-purpose choice as of 2026 with $50k for training, fine-tuning and running large open models?
Edit: I now see the author was in an apartment and couldn't do this, so I concede this is not responsive here.
:( you paid a professional pc builder and you weren't told this?
They did not. That's a mining rig not a workstation. It's visible from the photo and the chart showing multiple failures over a short period of time including the risers -- which are visibly very low quality -- failing twice.
You have 50K, you call a real expert like Puget Systems or Digital Storm.
There is no specs in this blogpost regarding cpu/motherboard choice, but if you go with threadripper pro they have 128 pci-e lanes for some time now, so using all GPUs at full speed shouldn't be a problem
At the time he put this rig together, there weren't a lot of open-weight LLMs that could run well on 6x48=288 GB, so it probably wasn't a huge loss. There still aren't, really.
Right now I'm in the process of cramming Blackwell cards into an old DDR4-based Milan server, where the important thing is to be able to run large models at all. The GPU fans alone burn over 400 watts at full throttle.
The server is going to live in the garage, so I'm not that concerned with noise. But I had no idea what to expect when I flipped the switch for the first time. It sounds like something out of the Book of Revelation. No way, no how could something like this be used in an inhabited area.
edit: Hm, finding mixed information online on whether that's still supported or not. Apparently it was removed in workstation GPUs.
"If I were to do this again, I wouldn’t do a custom build like this. I would buy a standard datacenter server and rent space in a colocation center. But then I would miss saying Hi to grumbl once in a while."