Internal company tools on a scavenged 1TB ECC server with mixed GPUs

This person refuses closed models on principle, keeping a strict downloaded open-weights policy even for toy projects, so that a component in a system can never silently change without recourse. Their fully local setup has produced several internal tools for their company that made previously non-automatable tasks much easier and cheaper to perform.

The server has 1TB of DDR4 ECC memory, bought just as prices began rising, with GPUs acquired cheaply: three RTX 3090s at $750, $1100 and $1000, and two P100s at about $100 each, all attached to two VMs over 8654 PCIe adapters. They report the economic impact as roughly ten times what they have paid for the setup, and say Qwen 3.8 27B and 3.8 Flash Next make the ROI on a $6K-$10K server possible when the use case has real financial impact.

Correct or update this entry

Is this your setup? Claim it to keep the snapshot current