Wichtige Informationen
A Reddit user known as markpronkin recently purchased a discarded crypto mining rig for 3,000 rubles, approximately $35. Discovered in a damp garage, the system contains nine Nvidia P106-100 GPUs, providing a total of 54GB of VRAM. Despite the seller refusing pre-purchase testing, all cards were functional upon arrival.
The rig utilizes 2017-era Pascal-generation hardware. While these cards lack modern CUDA support for newer driver branches, they remain capable of running specific AI models. The buyer successfully tested the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B mixture-of-experts model using Ollama, achieving speeds exceeding 30 tokens per second.
Performance is constrained by the system's weak Celeron CPU and PCIe 2.0 motherboard limitations. While the rig offers 1.7 times the VRAM of an RTX 5090 at a fraction of the cost, its memory bandwidth is significantly lower. Larger models, such as Llama 3.3 70B, may face severe bottlenecks, potentially dropping to 4.5 tokens per second.
The buyer plans to migrate the hardware to a more robust case supporting an i7-7700K CPU and additional GPUs. This project highlights the potential for repurposing legacy mining equipment for self-hosted AI, offering users privacy and increased VRAM capacity for specialized workloads.
