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I got an Nvidia GH200 server for €7.5k on Reddit and converted it to a desktop
- dnhkng 10mo agoThis is the story of how I bought enterprise-grade AI hardware designed for liquid-cooled server racks that was converted to air cooling, and then back again, survived multiple near-disasters (including GPUs reporting temperatures of 16 million degrees), and ended up with a desktop that can run 235B parameter models at home. It’s a tale of questionable decisions, creative problem-solving, and what happens when you try to turn datacenter equipment into a daily driver.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ipsum2 10mo agoI saw the same post on Reddit and was so tempted to purchase it, but I live in the US. Cool to see it wasn't a scam!
- amirhirsch 10mo ago# Tell the driver to completely ignore the NVLINK and it should allow the GPUs to initialise independently over PCIe !!!! This took a week of work to find, thanks Reddit! I needed this info, thanks for putting it up. Can this really be an issue for every data center?
- dauertewigkeit 10mo agoIt's a very interesting read, but a lot is not clear. How does the seller get these desktops directly from NVIDIA? And if the seller's business is custom made desktop boxes, why didn't he just fit the two H100s into a better desktop box?
- Ntrails 10mo ago> why didn't he just fit the two H100s into a better desktop box? I expect because they were no longer in the sort of condition to sell as new machines? They were clearly well used and selling "as seen" is the lowest reputational risk associated with offload
- renewiltord 10mo agoAt that pricing I honestly thought they fell off a truck. Even well used H100 go for more than that entire system. In the US an RTX A6000 Ada is already close in price.
- wtallis 10mo agoThere also weren't H100s available to scavenge. GH200 puts the Grace CPU and H100 GPU on a big module with a custom form factor and connectors, so the only viable route for using those GPUs was to keep all the electronics together and build a suitable case and cooling system around them. There wasn't any way to adapt any of this for use in an ordinary EATX case or with a different CPU, because the GPUs weren't PCIe add-in cards.
- dnhkng 10mo agoThese are on a custom board from Nvidia, so its not possible to separate them. I think the seller usually gets H100's and them into a custom case, with a PCIE adapter to the server GPUs. This thing too unwieldy to make into a desktop (you can see how much effort it took), and was in pretty bad condition. I think he just wanted to get rid of it without having to deal with returns. I took a bet on it, and was lucky it paid out.
- GPTshop 10mo agoWe build these desktops from Nvidia servers we buy from reputable manufacturers like Pegatron, Gigabyte, Asrock Rack, and many more. H100 PCI and GH200 are two very different things. The advantages of Grace Hopper are much higher connections speeds, bandwidth and lower power consumption.
- pointbob 10mo agoLoved it. You are mgyver. You should post more stuff on Twitter. Thanks for the story.
- ProAm 10mo agoWhich is how you learn to become an expert. I love it
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo agoDid it behave like a star at 16 million degrees? Lol
- jerome-jh 10mo agoSecuring soldered components with epoxy? You have to be very confident at your soldering :) You had no hot glue?
- dnhkng 10mo agoI've had a bit of practice, but I don't have the right gear for this level of soldering. It took maybe an hour to solder in 2 components, after many failed attempts. Persistence beats intelligence?
- baud147258 10mo agoWhen you said you paid cash, you paid all ~7.5k€ in paper money? How do you get that much cash out of your bank?
- devilbunny 10mo agoPresumably by going there, showing your ID, and withdrawing it? They might make you wait a day to have that much on hand, but not more than that.
- leipert 10mo agoWe are talking Germany here. People buy cars in cash. You don’t even have to necessarily wait a day.
- devilbunny 10mo agoTrue, which is why I said “might”. Even in the US. I only have to call ahead if I want smaller bills - $20 and $100 they usually have plenty of unless it’s a tiny branch.
- baud147258 10mo agook, I guess. I just never handled that many. I would also have though that the bank might ask questions
- devilbunny 10mo agoCash deposits or withdrawals over $10k in the US will be reported to the Treasury but if you don’t do them often it won’t raise a big flag, and the bank doesn’t care what you do with it. Treasury only cares if they think you are trying to evade taxes. In Germany, where large items are often purchased with cash, it would be unremarkable if you did it several times a year.
- dnhkng 10mo agoSure, its a free country! (I'm Australian, living in Germany).
- volf_ 10mo agoThat's awesome. These are the best kinds of posts
- BizarroLand 10mo agoYep. Just enough to inspire jealousy while also saying it's possible
- arein3 10mo agoIt's practically free
- ChrisArchitect 10mo agoMaybe the title could be I bought an Nvidia server..... to avoid confusion that it's something to do with Grace Hopper the person, and her servers ...or mainframes?
- walrus01 10mo agoGrace Hopper is the Nvidia product code name for the chip, much like how Intel cpus were named after rivers, etc https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-m&q=grace%20hopper%20Nvidia%20 https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-m&q=grace%20h...
- dnhkng 10mo agoMakes sense. I'm so used to the naming I forgot it's not common knowledge. I hope the new title is clearer.
- mrose11 10mo agoThis is freaking cool. Nice job!
- Philpax 10mo agoYou lucky dog. Have fun!
- albertgoeswoof 10mo agoWhat inference performance are you getting on this with llama? How long would it take to recoup the cost if you made the model available for others to run inference at the same price as the big players?
- kingstnap 10mo agoHe has GLM 4.5 Running at ~100 Tokens per second. Assumptions: Batch 4x and get 400 tokens per second and push his power consumption to 900W instead of the underutilized 300W. Electricity around €0.2/kWhr. Tokens valued at €1/1M out. Assume ~70% utilization. Result: You get ~1M tokens per hour which is a net profit of ~€0.8/hr. Which is a payoff time of a bit over a year or so given the €9K investment. Honestly though there is a lot of handwaving here. The most significant unknown is getting high utilization with aggressive batching and 24/7 load. Also the demand for privacy can make the utility of the tokens much higher than typical API prices for open source models. In a sort of orthogonal way renting 2 H100s costs around $6 per hour which makes the payback time a bit over a couple months.
- PhilippGille 10mo ago> He has GLM 4.5 Running at ~100 Tokens per second. GLM 4.5 Air, to be precise. It's a smaller 166B model, not the full 355B one. Worth mentioning when discussing token throughput.
- dnhkng 10mo agoI'm downloading DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale now at FP8 (reportedly Gold-medal performance in the 2025 International Mathematical Olympiad and International Olympiad in Informatics). It will fit in system RAM, and as its mixture of experts and the experts are not too large, I can at least run it. Token/second speed will be slower, but as system memory bandwidth is somewhere around 5-600Gb/s, so it should feel OK.
- Gracana 10mo agoCheck out "--n-cpu-moe" in llama.cpp if you're not familiar. That allows you to force a certain number of experts to be kept in system memory while everything else (including context cache and the parts of the model that every token touches) is kept in VRAM. You can do something like "-c128k -ngl 99 --n-cpu-moe <tuned_amt>" where you find a number that allows you to maximize VRAM usage without OOMing.
- MLgulabio 10mo agoArgh i was so so hoping that this is a 'thing' and I can just do that too. Lets continue to hope
- 20after4 10mo agoDeal of the century.
- skizm 10mo agoSerious question: does this thing actually make games run really great? Or are they so optimized for AI/ML workloads that they either don’t work or run normal video games poorly? Also: > I arrived at a farmhouse in a small forest… Were you not worried you were going to get murdered?
- jaggirs 10mo agoI believe these gpus dont have direct hdmi/DisplayPort outputs, so at the very least its tricky to even run a game on them, I guess you need to run the game in a VM or so?
- the8472 10mo agoCopying between GPUs is a thing, that's how integrated/discrete GPU switching works. So if the drivers provide full vulkan support then rendering on the nvidia and copying to another GPU with outputs could work. And it's an ARM CPU, so to run most games you need emulation (Wine+FEX), but Valve has been polishing that for their steamframe... so maybe? People have gotten games to run on a DGX Spark, which is somewhat similar (GB10 instead of GH200)
- dnhkng 10mo agoCorrect! I added an Nvidia T400 to the rig recently, as it gives me 4x Display ports, and a whole extra 2GB VRAM!
- throawayonthe 10mo agohttps://looking-glass.io/ https://looking-glass.io/ could be interesting
- nicman23 10mo agoyou can just force a edid in xorg and run sunshine (streaming)
- wtcactus 10mo ago
- tigranbs 10mo agoAh, that's the best way to spend ~10K
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- systemtest 10mo agoLove how a €7.5k 20 kilogram server is placed on a €5 particleboard table. I have owned several LACKs but would never put anything valuable on it. IKEA rates them at 25 kilogram maximum load.
- ivanjermakov 10mo agoWhole 25% safety margin!
- Ao7bei3s 10mo agoLACK tables specifically are well proven to be quite sturdy actually. They happen to be just the right width for servers / network devices, and so people have used them for that purpose for ages. Search for "LACK rack", or see e.g. https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack. 20kg is nothing; I've personally put >100kg on top.
- rtkwe 10mo agoThey're a bit less usable that way now. The legs are basically completely hollow these days so you're not actually able to bear much weight on the screws so the only option is stacking the items so the weight is born by whatever surface is below the "rack" at which point you could just as easily call stacking the equipment an air rack (or an iLackaRack maybe /s).
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- djoldman 10mo ago> Getting the actual GPU working was also painful, so I’ll leave the details here for future adventurers: > # Data Center/HGX-Series/HGX H100/Linux aarch64/12.8 seem to work! wget https://us.download.nvidia.com/tesla/570.195.03/NVIDIA-Linux-aarch64-570.195.03.run https://us.download.nvidia.com/tesla/570.195.03/NVIDIA-Linux... > ... Nothing makes you feel more "I've been there" than typing inscrutable arcana to get a GPU working for ML work...
- hollow-moe 10mo agoFor that price ? The bubble already popped for sure !
- Frannky 10mo agoWow! Kudos for thinking it was possible and making it happen. I was wondering how long it would be before big local models were possible under 10k—pretty impressive. Qwen3-235B can do mundane chat, coding, and agentic tasks pretty well.
- jauntywundrkind 10mo agoI feel like it's going to be a long long time before we get a repeat of something like this. And David did such an incredible job on this. Custom designed frame, designed his own water-block! Wildly great effort here. We'll see how it goes, but what _is_ happening is ram replacement. Nvidia 5090's with 96GB are somewhat a thing now. $4K. YMMV, caveat emptor. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Newest-RTX-5090-96gb-Graphics-Card_1601577163842.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Newest-RTX-5090-96gb-...
- ionwake 10mo agoinspiring! is there an ip i can connect to test the inference speed?
- m4r1k 10mo agoWow! As others have said, deal of the century!! As a side note, a few years back, I used to scrape eBay for Intel QS Xeon and quite a few times managed to snag incredible deals, but this is beyond anything anyone has ever achieved!
- ycwatcher 10mo agoGreat work on the rebuild! The photos are helpful, but if by any chance you happened to film the process, I'd love to see it on YouTube.
- dnhkng 10mo agoNo, it was done over the course of weeks, and I'm not motivated enough to do the production work required for good quality videos.
- jauntywundrkind 10mo agoWhat an incredible barn-find type story. Incredible. And you are among very few buyers who could have so lovingly done such an incredible job debugging driver & motherboard issues. Please add a kitsch Serial Experiment Lain themed computing shrine around this incredible work, and all's done. > 4x Arctic Liquid Freezer III 420 (B-Ware) - €180 Quite aside, but man: I fricking love Arctic. Seeing their fans in the new Corsi-Rosenthal boxes has been awesome. Such good value. I've been sing a Liquid Freeze II after nearly buying my last air-cooled heat-sink & seeing the LF-II onsale for <$75. Buy. Please give us some power consumption figures! I'm so curious how it scales up and down. Do different models take similar or different power? Asking a lot, but it'd be so neat to see a somewhat high res view (>1 sample/s) of power consumption (watts) on these things, such a unique opportunity.
- Tenemo 10mo agoHuge fan of those AIOs as well! I have LFIII 420mm in my PC and I've successfully built a 10x10cm cloud chamber with another one which is really pushing it as far as it can go.
- pointbob 10mo agoCan you bitcoin mine?
- Beijinger 10mo agoI would appreciate it if someone could name some shops where you can buy used enterprise grade equipment. Most of them are in California? Anything in NY/NJ
- bombcar 10mo agoLook on eBay, find sellers with multiple listings, track them down. There should be some all over the country.
- crapple8430 10mo agoWhile this is undoubtably still an excellent deal, the comparison to the new price of H100 is a bit misleading, since today you can buy a new, legit RTX 6000 Pro for about $7-8k, and get similar performance the first two of the models tested at least. As a bonus those can fit in a regular workstation or server, and you can buy multiple. This thing is not worth $80k in the same way that any old enterprise equipment is not worth nearly as much as its price when it was new.
- segmondy 10mo agoyou do realize he has 2 H100s, you would need to buy 2 RTX 6000 Pro for $15-$16k plus the hardware. The ram that came with that hardware is worth more than $7000 now.
- Helmut10001 10mo agoI think he is still correct in saying that the gear OP bought is worth much less now and further deteriorating fast. See my comment above here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46227813. GPUs have such a short liefspan these days that it is really important to compare new vs. used.
- dnhkng 10mo agoThis is hard to say for sure. I had 4x 4090, that I had bought for about $2200 each in early 2023. I sold 3 of them to help pay for the GH200, and got 2K each.
- segmondy 10mo agoIs it? The used data center P40s I bought for $150 2 years ago went back up to $450 a few months ago, I sold one for $400. I just checked and price is down to $200, so I'm still profitable. I bought MI50s for $90 less than a year ago, they are now going for $200. What deterioration? OPs gear was far less and is no longer deprecating. It will probably hold this value for the next 4 years.
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- pointbob 10mo agoActually the most incredible part of the story is that a computer geek ofthis 9th circle of geekdom level has a wife.
- dnhkng 10mo agoShe even read the article! (she did not find it funny though ;) )
- Helmut10001 10mo agoI recently had a similar experience, although not this size. Pre-story: For 3 years I wanted to build a rack-gaming-server, so I can play with my son in our small apartment where we don't have enough space for a gaming computer (wife also doesn't allow it). I have a stable IPsec connection to my parents house, where I have a powerfull PV plant (90kWp) and a rack server, for my freelance job. Fast forward to 2 months ago, I see a Supermicro SYS-7049GP-TRT for 1400€ on Ebay. It looks clean, sold by some IT reuse-warehouse. No desription, just 3 photos and the case label. I ask the seller whether he knows whats in it and he says he didn't check. The case alone comes new at 3k here in Germany. I buy it. It arrives. 64GB ECC memory, 2x Xeon silver, 1x 500GB SSD, 5x GBit LAN Cards. Dual 2200 Watt PowerSupply. I remove the airshroud, and: A Nvidia V100S 32GB emerges. I sell the card on ebay for 1600€ and buy 2x Xeon 6254 CPUs (100€ each) to replace the 2x Silver ones that are in it. Last week, I bought two Blackwell RTX 4000 Pro for 1100€ each. Enough for gaming with my son! (and I can do some fun with LLMs and home assistant/smart home..) The case fits 4x dual-size GPUs, so I could fit 4x RTX 6000 in it (384GB VRAM). At a price of 3k, this would come at 12k (still too much for me.. but let's check back in a couple of years..). Buying used enterprise gear is fun. I had so many good experiences and this stuff is just rock solid.
- fuzzythinker 10mo ago> Your mileage may vary. Literally: I had to drive two hours to pick this thing up. Good one
- danr4 10mo agoone of the coolest things i've seen recently. kudos!
- rcarmo 10mo agoPretty amazing, although the power consumption and volume put it past the envelope of what I would be willing to run at home…
- DANmode 10mo agoIt has an “off” mode :)
- zkmon 10mo agoSo, what do you plan to do with it?
- KellyCriterion 10mo agobut .. you know .. can it run Crysis? :-D SCNR
- fnands 10mo agoMan, you're living some crazy CyberPunk fever-dream. Nice find, and I admire your courage for even attempting this!
- kinow 10mo agoThat was enjoyable. I miss the days when I would buy old pieces, or find some in old dumpsters in Sao Paulo and try to use old video cards and memory modules to create little franksteins (a lot cheaper than this, but still fun). I found interesting to learn there are businesses around converting used servers into desktops. Sounds like a good initiative to avoid some e-waste (assuming the desktops are easy to maintain).
- rurban 10mo agoI also to limit my H100 GPU's to 300W max. They are specced at 310W, not 900W. But with 4*310W there are outages every 2nd week. You really need a special server cabinet and HVAC for these kind of beasts. But you've need them for training, right