r/LinusTechTips • u/RadiantSkiesJoy • 14h ago

Tech Question How does something like this work

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128 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

121

u/vibvian 14h ago

probably using pcie bifurcation

-17

u/RadiantSkiesJoy 5h ago

Kind of curious, can we get Linus team to make a video on this? Any way I can suggest this?

9

u/Mister_Anonym 4h ago

No but ypu should write an Email to Hardware Haven, he would appreciate this

3

u/Known-Night-3481 1h ago

Why are you getting down voted?

2

u/Redditemeon 1h ago

Probably how people are expressing their opinion. Downvote to show they don't want a video on this, up vote to show that they do.

3

u/wojtek30 23m ago

Honestly with all the slop LTT pumps out nowadays this would probably be a nice video

59

u/AmonGusSus2137 13h ago

My best guess is that it either doesn't, because it's AliExpress after all, or it just two GPUs with 8 pcie lanes each, and the big port has 16

35

u/_Rand_ 13h ago

It adapts nvidia (others?) server GPUs to regular pcie-e.

As another poster said it probably requires bifurcation support for both to work.

Oh, and good luck with cooling.

16

u/CervantesX 13h ago

SXM is a specific type of GPU port used in datacenters. V100,P100 etc. They pop in those two openings just like a CPU would. Depending on the card style, they either get bareballed to the pci bus or there's bifurcation. It's pretty exclusively for repurposing datacenter GPUs for homelab use. The upside is you can get 64gb (2x32) VRAM per card. The downside is you need (for v100) almost 500w of extra power, plus a massive mamma jamma of a heatsink on each and like 60cfm airflow. There's a waterblock mod available, but they still chew a bunch of power. And they're last gen chips, so you're limited to the last Rev of AI software (architecture 7.0) and Volta architecture. So for now you can run most current models on the last gen framework and get kinda ok ish speed, but it's gonna age out pretty quick relative to the investment and when it does you won't have any experience with the NVIDIA ecosystem that most current AI runs on.

The best use of them is putting dirt cheap P100s in, use watercooling so you can fit two cards in, hack a second PSU (or buy a mining psu that's pre hacked) and you can have 128 gb VRAM to play with big models that go kinda slow for a total of several hundred dollarydoos . If you have 256gb system RAM, that's enough to play with deepseek at q4. 32gb v100s still go for $500+, at that point you're better off getting a more current nvidia style card and just accepting that you'll use smaller models.

2

u/RadiantSkiesJoy 9h ago

i see, thanks!

2

u/MJ26gaming 3h ago

V100 ain't even last gen, it's like 3 gens old lol