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Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

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Re: Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

#211

Post by komali2 »

dekhn wrote: post #59
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even a single mention of gaming. No wonder gamers hate AI bros.

I have a second computer with an RTX 4090 for gaming (running Windows). I also used the new RTX 5090 running Linux to evaluate whether Proton/Wine allow me to run Windows games on linux (yes, it works, but the compatibility and frame rate issues make me stick to native Windows for now).

I have the same rig as you minus watercooling, and I assume you have AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D? Anyway, it's my only PC now, I game, dev, run local models, edit photos, edit videos, all in Manjaro. I get ~70FPS in Cyberpunk at 4k, every setting at "Insane" or whatever goofy thing they call it, Ray tracing on path tracing off, with no framegen but with DLSS set to quality. Without DLSS I get around 40fps. Seems equivalent to what I see online with people with a similar build on Windows.

I run hyprland, seems to be the only wayland based keyboard-forward WM that has good nvidia support (and, allegedly, supports HDR, though I haven't got this working). I heard gnome was pretty good otherwise. I was running i3 before and it also worked fine, however once I got into wanting to get streaming working, there wasn't good compatibility between i3/xorg and tools like sunshine. I believe steam streaming worked fine on it though iirc.

The only thing I miss from windows: easy streaming with sunshine/moonlight. Steam streaming works (usually heh) but it took me a couple days of fiddling to get a stream to work at all through sunshine, and it is choppy. But for local gaming, I don't miss windows at all, I'm so glad to finally have all my drives converted from NTFS to ext4.

Re: Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

#212

Post by throwawaytea »

tombert wrote: post #154
throwawaytea wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could ask AI and get pretty far reading the answer.

I know. But this is a forum filled with technical professionals and I would like to get actual opinions from actual humans. AI is cool but it's not going to have all the good and bad experiences that humans have had with different motherboards.

Actually that's the best part of AI. It has access to experience with way more than the select sample size here.

Re: Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

#213

Post by [deleted] »

cronin101 wrote: post #73
freediddy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25k is definitely a lot but I did the risk analysis and I figured worst case I would lose a 1000-2000 after a year of playing around with it, so I look at it more like renting (I'm going to keep the Macbook Pro no matter what since I needed a new one).

Nitpicking, but the worst case of spending $25k is unforeseen circumstances that write off the entire asset. I don’t think -$2000 is a conservative enough figure for standard depreciation either (a lot can happen in a year)

[deleted]

Re: Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

#214

Post by komali2 »

throwatdem12311 wrote: post #179
echelon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No wonder gamers hate AI bros. Personally, playing with AI models is way more fun than getting sucked into a game loop. Game loops feel like busy work hooked to an engineered dopamine drip. AI models are new frontiers and are exciting to build with, modify, lobotomize, and hack around with.

And some of us are doing AI stuff all freaking day at day job and just want to play some Tekken when we get home for 30 minutes after the kid is in bed. But now Playstations are 1000$ and Ram and GPU prices are astronomical. Not everyone is hustling 24/7 like some kind of lunatic.

[dead]

Re: Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

#215

Post by bronson »

carlob wrote: post #168
marai2 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Blurays are we talking about?

500 TB/25 GB = 20.000 if some have more than one layer it could fewer but that's the order of magnitude

If each Bluray is 2 hours long, that's 4.5 years of nonstop watching.

Re: Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

#216

Post by tombert »

throwawaytea wrote: post #212
tombert wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know. But this is a forum filled with technical professionals and I would like to get actual opinions from actual humans. AI is cool but it's not going to have all the good and bad experiences that humans have had with different motherboards.

Actually that's the best part of AI. It has access to experience with way more than the select sample size here.

I'm not entirely sure what your point is here; me asking for humans to give an opinion does not preclude me from also asking AI.

Re: Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

#218

Post by senectus1 »

You guys are nuts... I hope you're making enough money to justify this level of investment and power use (not to mention noise and heat management) in your home...

I'm just putting a 2nd hand 12gb 3060 into my lab box, but its only for use with HA/Paperless/Plex etc type things. I dont need multi-model agentic behavior for private use.

If I did I reckon I'd renting infrastructure rather than filling my home with that sort of gear.

Re: Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

#219

Post by selicos »

caymanjim wrote: post #132

This article appears to lack any reason for "needing" this beast, or any real comparison with alternatives, both of which are required to answer the question posed in the title. It's a summary of how much they spent and some light anecdotal comparison to what they might have spent on cloud services, but clearly they didn't do an exhaustive hunt for value. The real question is whether or not they could have done whate…

Their more recent post seems to suggest it was worthwhile. https://rosmine.ai/2026/05/18/fixing-llm-writing-with-distri...

Abstract/TLDR: LLMs are notoriously formulaic at writing, overusing certain tokens or phrases. I show that models trained with SFT fail to match the distribution of the training data by using Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), Judge Model Quality (JMQ), and L2 Token Distribution.

Re: Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

#220

Post by ActorNightly »

jon-wood wrote: post #14
freediddy wrote: post #10

In the last year, I have bought an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 512 GB, a Macbook Pro M5 MAX with 128 GB and an RTX 6000 Pro. I have spent around $25k so far, not including electricity. I figured worst case scenario I can sell them in the next year and only take a haircut as opposed to losing my entire investment. In comparison to just spending for tokens, the tokens would have been much cheaper and much much faster. I'v…

I’m not usually one to ask this because learning to do a thing can be fun, but why exactly have you spent 25 thousand dollars on getting an LLM someone else made to answer maths exam questions?

Because buying Macs is not about performance, its about feeling like you are rich.

That money could have been spent on way more bang/buck performance in the form of a set of 4 graphics cards.

Also I would probably put the odds 70:30 that Apple marketing is astroturfing on HN from the amount of posts about running llms on Macbooks, because in reality, the inference speed of any decent llm is unusable on a Macbook despite the ability to fit it into RAM.

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