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There's not much else (other than Epyc) in the way of affordably priced motherboards that have enough cumulative RAM. You can buy a used Dell dual socket older

There's not much else (other than Epyc) in the way of affordably priced motherboards that have enough cumulative RAM. You can buy a used Dell dual socket older xeon CPU server with 512GB of RAM for test/development purposes for not very much money. Under $1500 (before adding video cards or your own SSD), easily, with what I just found in a few minutes of searching. I'm also seeing things with 1024GB of RAM for under $2000. You also want to have the capability for more than one full speed at minimum PCI-Express x16 3.0 card, which means you need enough PCI-E lanes, which you aren't going to find on a single socket Intel workstation motherboard. Here's a couple of somewhat randomly chosen examples with 512GB of RAM and affordably priced. they'll be power hungry, and noisy. Same general idea from other x86-64 hardware such as from hp, supermicro, etc. These are fairly common in quantity so I'm using them as a baseline for specification vs price. Configurations will be something with 16 x 32GB DDR4 DIMMs. https://www.ebay.com/itm/186991103256?_skw=dell+poweredge+t630+512GB&itmmeta=01JNMMXN9KZYW18BXTS3FJ4P78&hash=item2b8989cd18:g:DUkAAOSwTd5nvh7A&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAABAFkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1cDq8JYEdwMA0hCESi8LOpm%2BTjrKqMmORBN7JFMXm73nxNogCCkoNK7mIilY5m5nhExssyrqPElZCR%2BV0fcwgekHTmp5mbcdSFW4GWbgTegh0qzcXlKe%2BOHQK%2FlVT1IY7iQHn35%2Fdrr3%2Fjj3xcAT42QQloifXpmA%2BUXkCdEAkeG6dxQ2Yjoba7RX0PVXnNDeB32GdVdvfCccltPkxGYgiX5pIf6GBEwAac6e5uxLYSoEeu6xxahh%2BP9x2PGmslRMvA--mWocWZH4yZE53GlEa9zoR7I4MmTYzq79RH9T%2FkWY1y5a1FLb11CjKBr5Ak5NV4%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR_rU9pStZQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/186991103256?_skw=dell+poweredge+t6... https://www.ebay.com/itm/235978320621?_skw=dell+poweredge+r730+512GB&itmmeta=01JNMN0TSK98S5CR6MNXNK0V1B&hash=item36f1676aed:g:Oo4AAeSwNLVnvx4p&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA0FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1f1RaGZaXc0qaT27Jp2wWgP%2BeLlJxoqY7RKJvyzvXiKcnHBcbdm8vUEZGWFkZ6EcuM6gL%2BWcOxltSOfauG1rU8jdfEuEFLQ%2FK6xzFo2khmE90CQ%2Fvt0cLdCGBZq%2BDlzBi3bkEBOGP08Xub8gvckcIQDgx8dqMFkliHm3B%2FcUhPT2qC8%2BKapKrpaSJ4swbpG14PZBpqWN4bOWhi%2BT%2BvWrZ5ZEE9tNKi9aZ%2BAAkuFj4mGudg2crAeu1HVVPRxVGoA%2BJ4%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR56tg5WtZQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/235978320621?_skw=dell+poweredge+r7... https://www.ebay.com/itm/115819389940?_skw=dell+poweredge+r730+512GB&itmmeta=01JNMN0TSK5PH9QM5C04KXP61W&hash=item1af75fa3f4:g:O2MAAOSwRtNkh97Y&itmprp=enc%3AAQAKAAAA0FkggFvd1GGDu0w3yXCmi1fVZjjmHsBiQ8qEYVz5I4ZnPDcIqGMowe5PZuSmUhbqWY8zUYOBURPCEKnFDBuZ8KVE5sw3DsMEdhJOHeD94MrLAzUin0oreQdhkAmOhxvitKBKA6ykXKlQQhdVPb4TRfqj%2Br2uYF%2BObtCgbVcEJ8LASVSG4PSzeochGZNA3eWVpGd0TuLt%2BZd789g4i3zJuXG9e%2Bc0vR%2BTIwGNPzRs8l9biTG0YHwdXvme9Jkl4BKkGaTTMbHGOKFFOrRizjBMOW0%3D%7Ctkp%3ABk9SR56tg5WtZQ https://www.ebay.com/itm/115819389940?_skw=dell+poweredge+r7...

numpad0 2y ago
PowerEdge R series is significantly cheaper if you already have an ear protection
- walrus01 2y ago
  yes, an R730 or R740 for instance. There's lots of used R630 and R640 with 512GB of RAM as well, but a 1U server is not the best thing to try putting gaming GPU type pci-express video cards into.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    i imagine you can't use the pcie 1x risers on inference workloads, like you can for crypto mining, as there's no data going between the card and the CPU in crypto and i guess inference is heavily bandwidth restricted. Unfortunate!
    - walrus01 2y ago
      The PCI-E slots in something like an 1U R630 or R640 are x8 or x16, the problem is more with the cooling and size/shape of the cards and how they cool themselves. The slots are meant to be used with things like 10 or 100 Gbps network cards or SAS/SATA host adapters which are considerably lower wattage than even a video card that's much weaker than an intel 770. Commonly you will also find configuration with two or three 'low profile' pci-express slots which have a different card height than the 'standard' height that most GPUs are built at.
      - genewitch 2y ago
        no, i mean like this https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rTCInAXSzKA https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rTCInAXSzKA that works for crypto because all the CPU sends to the card is the target ledger sha256sum (simplified) and the GPU generates nonces until the `sha256sum(sha256sum(nonce += ledger sum)` has however many zeros in the front. So until a card finds the correct nonce, or the server sends "new work" - a new ledger shasum, there's no traffic, really, between the GPU and the CPU. housekeeping, whatever, but not like 1GB/s!

numpad0 2y ago

PowerEdge R series is significantly cheaper if you already have an ear protection

walrus01 2y ago
yes, an R730 or R740 for instance. There's lots of used R630 and R640 with 512GB of RAM as well, but a 1U server is not the best thing to try putting gaming GPU type pci-express video cards into.
- genewitch 2y ago
  i imagine you can't use the pcie 1x risers on inference workloads, like you can for crypto mining, as there's no data going between the card and the CPU in crypto and i guess inference is heavily bandwidth restricted. Unfortunate!
  - walrus01 2y ago
    The PCI-E slots in something like an 1U R630 or R640 are x8 or x16, the problem is more with the cooling and size/shape of the cards and how they cool themselves. The slots are meant to be used with things like 10 or 100 Gbps network cards or SAS/SATA host adapters which are considerably lower wattage than even a video card that's much weaker than an intel 770. Commonly you will also find configuration with two or three 'low profile' pci-express slots which have a different card height than the 'standard' height that most GPUs are built at.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      no, i mean like this https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rTCInAXSzKA https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rTCInAXSzKA that works for crypto because all the CPU sends to the card is the target ledger sha256sum (simplified) and the GPU generates nonces until the `sha256sum(sha256sum(nonce += ledger sum)` has however many zeros in the front. So until a card finds the correct nonce, or the server sends "new work" - a new ledger shasum, there's no traffic, really, between the GPU and the CPU. housekeeping, whatever, but not like 1GB/s!