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GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

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Re: GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

#31

Post by bigyabai »

leoqa wrote: post #23

I have 3 3090s, all in various gaming computers. I’m not sure what to do with them- the VRAM is only 24GB so doesn’t seem worth the power costs to run an open weight model. Any suggestions on how I can run them as some type of cluster? Is it worth exploring NVLink?

You can layer models across multiple GPUs for inference. If you pooled it into one system, that would be 72gb of some pretty damn fast memory. Would be great for dense models in the 30-50b range.

Re: GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

#32

Post by drnick1 »

I still have one too in a home server to power a local AI model. That being said, even my 3090 is starting to show its age. Recent games require aggressive DLSS (performance or super performance) to maintain at usable 70-80fps at 4K. That being said, in practice the upscaling isn't very noticeable.

Re: GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

#33

Post by ls612 »

RavSS wrote: post #10

My old 1080 Ti now sits inside a 4U rackmount server. It's an EVGA SC2 HYBRID version and I am still amazed that the AIO cooler hasn't failed yet or leaked everywhere. One of the best things I've purchased in retrospect since it was my main GPU up until the middle of 2025, even though at the time in 2017 I felt the price of 1.5k NZD was extreme.

I have a similar plan for my 4090 once it's gaming days are over. I'll retire it into my homelab (I specifically massively overspecced the power supply in anticipation of this) and run whatever local AI models exist in 2028-2029 which can fit on it.

Re: GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

#34

Post by sixothree »

leoqa wrote: post #23

I have 3 3090s, all in various gaming computers. I’m not sure what to do with them- the VRAM is only 24GB so doesn’t seem worth the power costs to run an open weight model. Any suggestions on how I can run them as some type of cluster? Is it worth exploring NVLink?

Club 3090 will make installing llm easier, for 1 or more cards.

Re: GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

#36

Post by jonhohle »

drnick1 wrote: post #32

I still have one too in a home server to power a local AI model. That being said, even my 3090 is starting to show its age. Recent games require aggressive DLSS (performance or super performance) to maintain at usable 70-80fps at 4K. That being said, in practice the upscaling isn't very noticeable.

I wonder if we’ll see deflationary performance pressure over the next year or two as hardware prices remain out of reach for most. If cards and VRAM aren’t available, will studios adjust and optimize for more meager hardware requirements instead of targeting what many users will have 18 months from now?

Re: GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

#37

Post by jonhohle »

mrandish wrote: post #18
gdevenyi wrote: post #8

My 1080ti is my local inference machine now. With the release of the Bonsai 27B models I can run a genuine dense model with usable context. GOAT card.

I have a 1080ti currently not plugged in. More info please.

Plug it in, get the cuda drivers, run ollama or equivalent, and go from there. I use an 4GB Quadro card from the same generation and depending on the model can get faster than I can read output. It’s not as good as commercial models, but smaller Qwens and Gemmas work well. The Quadro came with a Dell refurb that cost about as much as the card would have by itself at the time.

(I’m doing this with passthrough on a FreeBSD host with bhyve to a Linux guest. Works great.)

I’d like a beefier card, but until prices come down, even older cards like this can do some interesting things if you give them enough time.

Re: GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

#38

Post by SyzygyRhythm »

leoqa wrote: post #23

I have 3 3090s, all in various gaming computers. I’m not sure what to do with them- the VRAM is only 24GB so doesn’t seem worth the power costs to run an open weight model. Any suggestions on how I can run them as some type of cluster? Is it worth exploring NVLink?

As others said, you can run more than one at a time, but even singly, 24 GB can be very useful in a hybrid approach. For instance, I recently had to process hundreds of high-res blueprints. Used Fable for the main orchestration, but all of the OCR and other work I did with a small local model. Didn't waste expensive Fable tokens on simple grunt work.

Re: GTX 1080s: Testing a Legend

#40

Post by [deleted] »

tenacious_tuna wrote: post #2

I'm still using a 1080ti in my main PC, though I don't play as many games as I used to. Control is the last title I picked up where I really felt like I was pushing the graphics capability of my rig. I remember when I built my PC I was surprised when I'd come across a post of someone running ancient (at the time) chips like the i7-870, and now I'm realizing I am one of those people. My 2700X and 1080ti do plenty of w…

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