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I used Tim's guide to build a dual RTX 3090 PC, paying 2300€ in total by getting used components. It can run inference of Llama-65B 4bit quantized at more than 10tok/s.

Specs: 2x RTX 3090, NVLink Bridge, 128GB DDR4 3200 RAM, Ryzen 7 3700X, X570 SLI mainboard, 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD, air cooled mesh case.

Finding the 3-slot nvlink bridge is hard and it's usually expensive. I think it's not worth it in most cases. I managed to find a cheap used one. Cooling is also a challenge. The cards are 2.7 slots wide and the spacing is usually 3 slots, so there isn't much room. Some people are putting 3d printed shrouds on the back of the PC case to suck the air out of the cards with an extra external fan. Also limiting the power from 350W to 280W or so per card doesn't cost a lot of performance. The CPU is not limiting the performance at all, as long as you have 4 cores per GPU you're good.



My build is close to this. I purchased everything new except the 3090s, and I paid about $3000.

2x RTX 3090

128 GB DDR5

Intel core i9 600 series

Z790 Mainboard

I used Intel instead of AMD for the cpu, which pushed my prices higher... but I saved on the back side by skipping the NVLink Bridge.

Good to know I'm not missing much with out the Bridge, since I get about 13tok/s on Llama-65B 4 bit if I push all layers onto the GPU.


Managed to snatch a 3090 during the GPU shortage in 2020. Did a lot of training and mining, and got some of my results published, think I gained much more than the cost of the hardware purchases. Kinda miss the day of eth mining. 3090 is a still good card and I'm pretty sure your rig is going to serve you well.

ps: ~280W power limit is a good call, it won't heat up your room too much.




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