this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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The problem is simple: consumer motherboards don't have that many PCIe slots, and consumer CPUs don't have enough lanes to run 3+ GPUs at full PCIe gen 3 or gen 4 speeds.

My idea was to buy 3-4 computers for cheap, slot a GPU into each of them and use 4 of them in tandem. I imagine this will require some sort of agent running on each node which will be connected through a 10Gbe network. I can get a 10Gbe network running for this project.

Does Ollama or any other local AI project support this? Getting a server motherboard with CPU is going to get expensive very quickly, but this would be a great alternative.

Thanks

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[–] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (12 children)

Basically no GPU needs a full PCIe x16 slot to run at full speed. There are motherboards out there which will give you 3 or 4 slots of PCIe x8 electrical (x16 physical). I would look into those.

Edit: If you are willing to buy a board that supports AMD Epyc processors, you can get boards with basically as many PCIe slots as you could ever hope for. But that is almost certainly overkill for this task.

[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 weeks ago (11 children)

Aren't Epyc boards really expensive? I was going to buy 3-4 used computers and stuff a GPU in each.

Are there motherboards on the used market that can run the E5-2600 V4 series CPUs and have multiple PCIe Xi slots? The only ones I found were super expensive/esoteric.

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