from Hacker News

Building WOPR: A 7x4090 AI Server

by ollin on 3/26/24, 4:15 PM with 11 comments

  • by neilv on 3/26/24, 6:06 PM

    Excellent priorities. When building a $12K-$15K basement AI supercomputer, the money goes into the GPUs and making the critical functionality perform (PCIe retimer card?!)... but the monitoring console can be an old beige CRT, like people pay to have hauled away from the curb. :)

  • by fgblanch on 3/26/24, 5:15 PM

    I love the name "WOPR" and the reference to Wargames film

  • by ollin on 3/26/24, 5:56 PM

    more q&as from the author on twitter https://twitter.com/mov_axbx/status/1772548497566294345

    ---

    why the crt monitor?

    > What I had handy with a VGA input

    I am wondering how you went over the p2p problem with the 4090. I thought it was disabled

    > They don’t have p2p enabled

    Would using 3090 be more cost effective ?

    > Depends how you measure. Throughput per $ is higher for 4090s than 3090s at retail pricing.

    > Comparing scalper 4090 to used mining 3090 a different story but people have reported those 3090s going bad after a while

    This is amazing! :D How much did it all cost? (Perhaps you could add prices to the bill of materials page?)

    > I’ll have to total it all up, I’m a little more low key when it comes to that sort of thing so I was kind of avoiding showing that. But maybe I’ll throw it in the FAQ

  • by lostmsu on 3/26/24, 6:40 PM

    Great post. After reading I would limit myself to 6 cards on this particular motherboard though.

  • by maizeq on 3/26/24, 6:35 PM

    Great guide. Really surprised air cooling is enough. My single 4090 kicks out enough heat that it’s a miniature heater for my room. Also, only 512Mb RAM??

  • by thangngoc89 on 3/26/24, 6:34 PM

    I come you can find the Foundation model with blower style fan. I’ve been scouring 4 of them for a 4x build. I have the other style of fan in a dual build and the heat dispensation is bad.

  • by chessgecko on 3/26/24, 7:50 PM

    It's a shame they won't make a pcie mi300x. It has about the same amount of compute/memory as this and if the rumor mill is right it would cost almost the same.

  • by Avlin67 on 3/26/24, 7:45 PM

    why not use 1 slot width gpu waterblocks ??? so you can put gpu straight to motherboard