I got an Nvidia GH200 server for €7.5k on Reddit and converted it to a desktop

I needed this info, thanks for putting it up. Can this really be an issue for every data center?

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?

The Blackwells are superior on paper, but there's some "Nvidia Math" involved: When they report performance in press announcements, they don't usually mention the precision. Yes, the Blackwells are more than double the speed of the Hopper H100's, but thats comparing FP8 to FP4 (the H100's can't do native FP4). Yes, thats great for certain workloads, but not the majority.

What's more interesting is the VRAM speed. The 6000 Pro has 96 GB of GPU memory and 1.8 TB/s bandwidth, the H100 haas the same amount, but with HBM3 at 4.9 TB/s. That 2.5X increase is very influential in the overall performance of the system.

Lastly, if it works, the NVLink-C2C does 900 GB/s of bandwidth between the cards, so about 5x what a pair of 6000 Pros could do over PCIE5. Big LLMs need well over the 96 GB on a single card, so this becomes the bottleneck.

e.g. Here are benchmarks on the RTX 6000 pro using the GPT-OSS-120B model, where it generates 145 tokens/sec, and I get 195 tokens/sec on the GH200. https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mm7azs/openai_...

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

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.

There should be some all over the country.

We'll see how it goes, but what _is_ happening is ram replacement. Nvidia 5090's with 96GB are somewhat a thing now. $4K. YMMV, caveat emptor. https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Newest-RTX-5090-96gb-...

Assumptions:

Batch 4x and get 400 tokens per second and push his power consumption to 900W instead of the underutilized 300W.

Electricity around €0.2/kWhr.

Tokens valued at €1/1M out.

Assume ~70% utilization.

Result:

You get ~1M tokens per hour which is a net profit of ~€0.8/hr. Which is a payoff time of a bit over a year or so given the €9K investment.

Honestly though there is a lot of handwaving here. The most significant unknown is getting high utilization with aggressive batching and 24/7 load.

Also the demand for privacy can make the utility of the tokens much higher than typical API prices for open source models.

In a sort of orthogonal way renting 2 H100s costs around $6 per hour which makes the payback time a bit over a couple months.

I think there are probably Law Firms/doctors offices that would gladly pay ~3-4K euro a month to have this thing delivered and run truely "on-prem" to work with documents they can't risk leaking (patent filings, patient records etc).

For a company with 20-30 people, the legal and privacy protection is worth the small premium over using cloud providers.

Just a hunch though! This would have it paid-off in 3-4 months?

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-m&q=grace%20h...