If you’re just learning, I’d actually look at using a cloud based provider where you can just spin up a gpu vps for the duration of each experiment.
Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
#12[flagged]
This was written by ChatGPT, right?
Re: Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
#13[flagged]
Interestingly, that's a ChatGPT answer.
Re: Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
#14Re: Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
#15Remember that the K40s do not support the latest PyTorch operations due to their old compute capabilities (e.g., torch.compile).
Re: Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
#16modern AI models and frameworks often require cuda versions and features which are not available on these old GPUs.
Unless you know what you are doing I would not buy them.
Re: Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
#17Re: Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
#18Re: Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
#19Those who do not recommend, do you have any suggestions for people just getting into the field?
https://coral.ai/
nvidia ai starter kitRe: Ask HN: Worth it to buy 4x Nvidia Tesla K40 for AI?
#20While it's technically not a bad price in terms of raw compute and memory, the noise from the high speed server fans alone is reason enough not to get this. Never mind the power usage.
I was going to say maybe it'd be worth it if they were 24GB GPUs, but I'm not sure you can even use recent Pytorch with cards that old. You'd have to work around the limitations.
You don't even need a GPU to learn anyway, you can use tiny models that train super fast even on CPU for that. You need the beefy GPUs once you want to generate tons of content or train a modern model on big datasets.
Get a 3060 12GB or a 2080Ti 11GB and call it day, at most.