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Posted by birdculture 5 hours ago

I put a datacenter GPU in my gaming PC(blog.tymscar.com)
173 points | 118 commentspage 2
abejfehr 4 hours ago|
Based on the title I was really hoping to see how this was used for gaming, but they just ran an LLM on it
darkwater 3 hours ago||
They said in the beginning that it doesn't even have a video out, so you cannot do gaming.
toast0 2 hours ago|||
I've seen things where you have multiple video cards and can use one gpu to render to a framebuffer which is transferred to the other video card to output. I'm sure it adds latency, and it's probably unsupported... But no output doesn't mean can't do gaming... It just means gaming will be iffy.

There's some virtualized desktop server stuff too. Run a bunch of desktop sessions on a beefy computer and send a video stream to desktop players. With the right codec settings, the latency is probably ok for many games.

hakfoo 1 hour ago||||
I'm actually surprised there hasn't been a dedicated effort to support display offload to, say, the CPU's iGPU.

I'm sure manufacturers would love saving a dollar per card, and OEMs would appreciate eliminating the support calls from "I just bought a new $2500 gaming PC and no video" because they plugged the monitor into the iGPU instead of dGPU.

yjftsjthsd-h 2 hours ago||||
I thought you could run games by rendering on one GPU and outputting on another? Usually comes up with dual iGPU/dGPU setups, but could work here
lightedman 1 hour ago|||
Never a problem. RemoteFX does (did) everything you'd want. Make your OS, log in remotely through an accelerated client. The real problem is Microsoft did something around Windows Server 2008 R2 that killed performance (literally halved it) for RemoteFX. You're only now reobtaining the virtualized video performance we used to have back in 2008.
axpy906 4 hours ago|||
Same. With no new NVIDIA gaming GPUs this year, seems like an interesting problem to solve.
mschuster91 4 hours ago||
I don't think that is even possible, every piece of silicon on that chip that is required to do gaming is ripped out in favor of more compute cores.
lucamark 5 hours ago||
Congrats! Most people won’t want to debug drivers, kernels, ACPI, adapters, and fan headers. But for those who do, the capability-per-pound is absurd.
omarqureshi 4 hours ago||
Could probably avoid the crazy fan with a waterblock - I've seen a whole kit, v100 + PCIE adapter + block for £235. Yes, you'll have to pay for pump, radiators and radiator fans, but that should really quieten it down
pogue 4 hours ago|
Someone's already made such a kit as you describe to fit in a consumer PC case and work properly?
omarqureshi 1 hour ago|||
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/406939340557?var=677143153030&mke...
omarqureshi 1 hour ago||||
32 GB kit as well

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/406939344915?_trkparms=amclksrc%3...

jeffrallen 1 hour ago||
Super interesting. I use data center GPUs at work, but I didn't know anything about this stuff.

I also use Qwen 3.7 27b at work and I agree with the author: it is perfectly capable of the jobs I give it.

whoamii 4 hours ago||
The real question: did your local LLM write this post?
20wenty 3 hours ago|
There are many tells aren't there? There was clearly hard human work and experimentation here, but it's a shame the OP let AI do chunks of the writing. Once you see it, it's much harder to take the post seriously.
tymscar 1 hour ago|||
Not at all, no. I had this chat before about how I am one of those unlucky few that loved the way LLMs write nowadays since the mid-2000s.

Slowly but surely, I had to remove my beloved lists, emojis (though LLMs do less of that now, maybe I can incorporate them back), and emdashes.

iugtmkbdfil834 3 hours ago||||
I disagree. Not everyone has a good writing style. In those instances I think it is fair to default to llm recommendation. We may be allergic to it, but we saw one formulaic response too many ( though admittedly it does raise a question of whether HN was the intended audience for it ).

In any event, not all of us have a unique writing style worth preserving just like not all of us can write clear and clean code. Just saying.

unshavedyak 3 hours ago|||
I really wish it was more common to use AI for augmenting than authoring. Eg i find coding with LLMs neat when you primarily "talk" to it through code, by filling out structs, funcs, fields, etc - where it would use your changes as the template and then to work to effectively autocomplete the gaps. The more you iteratively write the less it fills in, but also the less it deviates from your intent, design, etc.

I feel like writing could use a similar harness, where it attempts to minimally reword the authors sentences, perhaps just tweaking grammar, spelling, etc. In the coding example i think the human code would be near unchangeable, the LLM would pivot around it - but in the writing example i think the human writing would have to be more mutable. I imagine it would be a configurable setting.

I've not really seen a system which focuses on this human<->LLM look, but it feels interesting to me.

iugtmkbdfil834 2 hours ago||
In a sense, there is a clear market for it ( people want 'authentic' experience ). I can kinda understand it. I want pure linux experience without systemd, but I recognize that in the current ecosystem, it comes at a cost.

So the language harness makes sense to me, but corps are already cracking down on token use ( and such a harness would likely only add to the cost ). The other question is whether the people, who could benefit it would even recognize it as a problem though.

yjftsjthsd-h 2 hours ago||
> I want pure linux experience without systemd, but I recognize that in the current ecosystem, it comes at a cost.

Running Alpine/Gentoo/Devuan isn't that expensive. (I'm assuming the cost is time/effort when I say this; let me know if there's another relevant metric)

iugtmkbdfil834 1 hour ago||
No, you are right on point. I think I reached the same level of 'troubleshooting fatigue' my buddy did ( but he does that for a living, which adds another layer to this ). At certain point, I just want stuff to work. And right now at least, systemd provides least amount of annoyance in terms of time spent chasing issues on home machines.

FWIW, I tried Void and Devuan, but that may have been too early for me then. Naturally, now that stuff mostly works, I am debating whether I can make that attempt again;p

gsquaredxc 2 hours ago|||
It’s not about preserving a unique writing style. When I see LLM writing my brain automatically discards the content of the writing. To me, seeing LLM writing is equivalent to going to a high-end restaurant and getting served on generic paper plates. Sure, the food looks perfectly fine and there is, in theory, nothing wrong with a paper plate. Once you see that paper plate, however, you will question how nice that establishment actually is, because a lack of care for the plates undermines the quality of the food. You automatically categorize all establishments that serve on paper plates in a specific category, one that might make you concerned if you will get food poisoning that night. LLM writing is exactly the same way for me. I don’t know if this LLM-assisted piece of text is actually a Michelin three star establishment or has had several heath violations in the last year. However, I didn’t pay for it, so putting in effort to determine if it’s LLM-assisted writing from an expert or just LLM slop that isn’t from the purported author at all isn’t worth the time.

I’m much more willing to read typos and bad writing than LLM writing. If I want to read the LLM rewritten version, I can run an LLM over the original writing myself. I have not yet found true that anyone is better at prompting than anyone else in a way that suggests that I wouldn’t get substantially the same results myself. Thus, I don’t think providing the version that has passed through the telephone game is accomplishing something that couldn’t be done by readers later. I have spent the vast majority of my life reading the original writing styles of people and didn’t have an issue then. I’m not convinced a problem I had was solved when we started post-processing writing with an LLM.

lukeschlather 2 hours ago||
I skim a lot. I skimmed this article and appreciated the author documenting their process. I am indifferent to LLM or human writing for technical content. I suspect I skimmed most of the LLM parts, but judging writing quality was not why I read this post, I read it because I was curious about how useful the GPU is, and if I could replicate the author's work. Some carefully written prose wouldn't have helped me do that any better. The prose in this article did the job.
iugtmkbdfil834 1 hour ago||
This is mostly how I feel about it. If anything, the weird llm jitters served almost like punctuation markers. Still, I get why it riles some people up.
lowbloodsugar 1 hour ago||||
Oh then please stop reading. There are many of us who are really good at solving complex problems and also really bad at communicating them. Your attitude is just the latest bastion of bigotry. So do feel free to self-select out of useful knowledge and experience.
xp84 3 hours ago|||
(TL;DR Can we just judge written works by their actual content?)

I’m really in the “who gives a shit” camp on something like this. A lot of people probably have an LLM punch up a blog post. It is good at turning bullet points and notes into prose, fixing run-ons, etc. Maybe I’m naive but I trust that the kind of person who posts a clearly noncommercial post like this on HN gives a crap enough that they read the final draft and confirmed it isn’t inaccurate.

This pearl-clutching about the mere use of AI regardless of how responsible or appropriate the use is, seems like a professor in 1985 throwing an essay back in a student’s face as “this was obviously printed from a computer and not typewritten like a PROPER essay! I can tell just by looking at it!”

00dazzle 3 hours ago||
That's the same price per VRAM GB as an arc pro B70
tymscar 1 hour ago|
But with miles better support, thats why I went this route. Cuda is hard to beat
ewy1 4 hours ago||
despite gaming being used in the title, it is not mentioned in the article, but i'm curious how this performs.

i've ran some multi vendor frankenstein setups before and sometimes it even works, so i'm curious to hear your experience with it.

jmyeet 5 hours ago||
Some context:

- In 2017, the v100 was a ~$10,000 GPU. I believe there was a PCI-e version but this is probably so cheap because SXM2 is going to be harder to use;

- A 5090 has 1800GB/s of internal memory bandwidth (compared to 900GB/s in the 9 year old GPU). Of course a 5090 is substantially more expensive;

- A 5090 has ~21k CUDA cores vs ~5k;

- The current $10k NVidia GPU is the RTX 6000 Pro w/ 96GB of VRAM. It has slightly more CUDA cores but it otherwise pretty much just a 5090. This is unsurprising. NVidia uses VRAM for market segmentation.

Consider this: in 5-10 years, the trillions spent on AI data centers will likewise be sold for scrap most likely. That's how short the runway is for OpenAI and Anthropic to recover that investment.

Anyway, I'm kind of impressed the author managed to get this all to work. I don't think it even would've occurred to me that someone had made an SXM2 adapter, particularly because it's not even used anymore. Like props to whoever did that.

echelon 4 hours ago||
> Consider this: in 5-10 years, the trillions spent on AI data centers will likewise be sold for scrap most likely. That's how short the runway is for OpenAI and Anthropic to recover that investment.

Even more interesting: it'll devalue all of SaaS and the entire US tech sector.

We might have just shot our most valuable non-AI tech products in the foot.

wholinator2 3 hours ago|||
How so? I understand that flooding the market with physical goods will reduce prices and thus profits. But how would that also reduce the nonphysical SAAS stuff?
mschuster91 3 hours ago||
> But how would that also reduce the nonphysical SAAS stuff?

The resulting economic crash will affect everyone, we're (IMHO) looking towards a dotcom-bust level wipeout. And many SaaS and other companies run asset-lean (i.e. they have no server hardware because that's all cloud, no real estate because it's all either wework or conventionally rented), margin-lean (the VC business model requires that, as the basic recipe is to achieve market domination by burning cash) and cash-lean (often enough, it's less than a quarter of expenses on the bank accounts).

All that "lean-ness" looks great on an investor's quarterly release sheet: no massive amounts of wealth tied up in assets and no cash sitting around on bank accounts that could be released towards investors as dividends or, if it comes from third parties, costs the company interest... but it prevents resiliency against crises.

mschuster91 3 hours ago|||
> We might have just shot our most valuable non-AI tech products in the foot.

Counterpoint: the fiber buildout during the dotcom boost. That crashed the economy pretty hard when the bubble burst, but we are still benefitting from all the dark fiber that was arranged for and built out back in that era. A lot of today's ISPs were able to grab up that fiber after the bust for cents on the dollar.

Assume that OpenAI and Anthropic go bust, which at least one of them likely will, and possibly a fair few of the datacenters that are under construction will also collapse. Someone will be able to snatch these physical assets again for cents on the dollar and run open-weight models on them or train new ones.

The problem isn't (and no, this is not an AI tell, everything I write here got typed on a 2022 M2 MBA by hand) the assets, they will be put up for productive usage, just as with any other large bankruptcy or bubble in history. The problem is the "IOU" that is being passed from one hand to the next like a hot potato. Assuming a recovery of, maybe, 20% after the collapse, at 1.6 trillion dollars of assets under management by some kind of private investment/debt we're looking at about 1.3 trillion dollars in valuation that is going to be wiped out.

And given that a lot of the investment market is actually backed by pension funds... this is going to be a bloodbath. Not only will there be a lot of people laid off in addition to the layoffs we already saw "due to AI", but when the pension funds and thus their payouts collapse? We'll see retirees flooding the employment markets who just try to make a living, rendering the situation for everyone else even worse. Flipping burgers used to be a gig for students, these days students compete with people of all ages desperate to survive - and thus desperate to undercut others in wages.

Another problem will be the capacity buildout in the semiconductor industry. It's already heading toward an oligopoly after numerous boom-bust cycles: you only have two and a half GPU chip vendors (NV, AMD, Intel), two vendors of general-purpose CPU vendors (Intel and AMD - I exclude Apple because they do not sell their CPUs to any third party and ARM because 99% of non-Apple ARM chips do not go towards servers, desktops and laptops), three RAM manufacturers (Samsung, SKhynix, Micron) and two and a half physical chip manufacturers (TSMC, Samsung, Intel). When the AI bubble bursts, it will be one of a hell of an effort to prevent at least one actor from going bankrupt.

[1] https://prospect.org/2025/11/19/ai-bubble-bigger-than-you-th...

hakfoo 1 hour ago||
You're expecting that there's going to be a supply collapse only, but there's a real risk the collapse hits both supply and demand.

A lot of the current AI business is FOMO and vanity metrics. Nobody really wants to acknowledge the support tickets where the first three responses are the customer cursing because they didn't appreciate being handed off to a chatbot, or the reworks, or the compliance/policy/privacy concerns, or the internal friction and brand damage it's causing.

Right now, a lot of that is being dazzled away by how "cheap" the alternative is, since it's built on an unsustainable cost base. It's like someone opened a "restaurant" where the food was actually supplied by making a bazillion new DoorDash accounts to claim promotional credits and having them drop the food at the "kitchen". During the initial phase, the customers will forgive that the burger was cold because it was $1.79.

Once the funny money runs out and services start shuttering or pricing for actual profitability, people are going to ask about actual quality and return on investment. There will be a demand rollback.

Even if you can do it cheaper with an open-model running on fire-sale hardware, we probably don't need 500 "chatbot listens and transcribes your meeting" services that weren't that much better than dictation software running locally on a Pentium III. We probably don't need AI-powered support experiences that manage to be worse than actually keyword-searching your company's Confluence. We probably don't need to be spinning up coding agents to spend 15 minutes discombobulating and bibblewabbling and re-reading 82 billion tokens of context before making a two-line change that an actual developer with learned experience in the code would make in 15 seconds.

b112 4 hours ago||
I bet 3 years, but otherwise agree.
KnuthIsGod 4 hours ago||
AI written posts will kill HN.
tymscar 1 hour ago|
AI didnt edit a single word of this post.
pogue 4 hours ago|
But could you game with the GPU? Or is that purely a drivers issue?
mcraiha 1 hour ago|
I assume you can game with it if you use modded drivers. At least with CMP 50HX that is possible https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-cmp-50hx-turned-into-gami...
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