[HN Gopher] I got an Nvidia GH200 server for EUR7.5k on Reddit a...
___________________________________________________________________
I got an Nvidia GH200 server for EUR7.5k on Reddit and converted it
to a desktop
Author : dnhkng
Score : 140 points
Date : 2025-12-10 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dnhkng.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (dnhkng.github.io)
| dnhkng wrote:
| This 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.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| # 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| > 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
| volf_ wrote:
| That's awesome.
|
| These are the best kinds of posts
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Yep. Just enough to inspire jealousy while also saying it's
| possible
| arein3 wrote:
| It's practically free
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Maybe 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 wrote:
| Grace 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%20h...
| dnhkng wrote:
| Makes sense. I'm so used to the naming I forgot it's not common
| knowledge. I hope the new title is clearer.
| mrose11 wrote:
| This is freaking cool. Nice job!
| Philpax wrote:
| You lucky dog. Have fun!
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| What 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?
| 20after4 wrote:
| Deal of the century.
| skizm wrote:
| Serious 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 wrote:
| I 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?
| mrandish wrote:
| > does this thing actually make games run really great
|
| It's an interesting question, and since OP indicates he
| previously had a 4090, he's qualified to reply and hopefully
| will. However, I suspect the GH200 won't turn out to run games
| much faster than a 5090 because A) Games aren't designed to
| exploit the increased capabilities of this hardware, and B) The
| GH200 drivers wouldn't be tuned for game performance. One of
| the biggest differences of datacenter AI GPUs is the sheer
| memory size, and there's little reason for a game to assume
| there's more than 16GB of video memory available.
|
| More broadly, this is a question that, for the past couple
| decades, I'd have been _very_ interested in. For a lot of
| years, looking at today 's most esoteric, expensive state-of-
| the-art was the best way to predict what tomorrow's consumer
| desktop might be capable of. However, these days I'm surprised
| to find myself no longer fascinated by this. Having been
| riveted by the constant march of real-time computer graphics
| from the 90s to 2020 (including attending many Siggraph
| conferences in the 90s and 00s), I think we're now nearing the
| end of truly significant progress in consumer gaming graphics.
|
| I _do_ realize that 's a controversial statement, and sure
| there will always be a way to throw more polys, bigger textures
| and heavier algorithms at any game, but... each increasing
| increment just doesn't _matter_ as much as it once did. For
| typical desktop and couch consumer gaming, the upgrade from
| 20fps to 60fps was a lot more meaningful to most people than
| 120fps to 360fps. With synthetic frame and pixel generation,
| increasing resolution beyond native 4K matters less. (Note:
| head-mounted AR /VR might one of the few places 'moar pixels'
| really matters in the future). Sure, it can look a bit sharper,
| a bit more varied and the shadows can have more perfect ray-
| traced fall-off, but at this point piling on even more of those
| technically impressive feats of CGI doesn't make the game more
| fun to play, whether on a 75" TV at 8 feet or a 34-inch monitor
| at two feet. As an old-school computer graphics guy, it's
| incredible to be see real-time path tracing adding subtle
| colors to shadows from light reflections bouncing off colored
| walls. It's living in the sci-fi future we dreamed of at
| Siggraph '92. But as a gamer looking for some fun tonight,
| honestly... the improved visuals don't contribute much to the
| overall gameplay between a 3070, 4070 and 5070.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I'd guess that the datacenter "GPUs" lack all the fixed-
| function graphics hardware (texture samplers, etc) that's
| still there in modern consumer GPUs.
| Havoc wrote:
| >Serious question: does this thing actually make games run
| really great?
|
| LTT tried it in one of their videos...forgot which card but one
| of the serious nvidia AI cards.
|
| ...it runs like shit for gaming workloads. It does the job but
| comfortably beaten by a mid tier consumer card for 1/10th the
| price
|
| Their AI track datacenter cards are definitely not same thing
| different badge glued on
| tigranbs wrote:
| Ah, that's the best way to spend ~10K
| systemtest wrote:
| Love how a EUR7.5k 20 kilogram server is placed on a EUR5
| particleboard table. I have owned several LACKs but would never
| put anything valuable on it. IKEA rates them at 25 kilogram
| maximum load.
| djoldman wrote:
| > 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...
|
| > ...
|
| Nothing makes you feel more "I've been there" than typing
| inscrutable arcana to get a GPU working for ML work...
| hollow-moe wrote:
| For that price ? The bubble already popped for sure !
| Frannky wrote:
| Wow! 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.
| ionwake wrote:
| inspiring! is there an ip i can connect to test the inference
| speed?
| m4r1k wrote:
| Wow! 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!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-10 23:01 UTC)