I bought a datacenter GPU that doesn't fit in a normal motherboard, macgyvered the fan with jumper wires, and now I'm running a model that ties with Claude Sonnet 4.6 on benchmarks, all for £200.
I hope someone turns these adapter boards into a consumer grade product, once that happens. Certainly has potential. The question is: can you game on these?
You can do CUDA on these, which is not nothing. With that you can run DOOM and pipe it to a video out. If there is a glut of cheap new versions of these after a bubble pop, perhaps the effort will be made to bodge these into pretending they’re a 5090 or something for the drivers, probably on Linux. It’s certainly possible, but significant work. If they’re cheap enough, and plentiful enough, life will find a way.
What they are good at, right now, is running local LLMs, scientific computing, etc., and it is done reasonably commonly by hobbyists. Likely also Photoshop and similar if you want the pain of running them on windows.
A while back I was able to use an nvidia m40 as a GPU while using embedded intel as the primary video output. This worked back then because laptops with nvidia GPUs rely on this hybrid GPu setup built into windows to conserve power and optimize for apps that actually need acceleration (windows surface book had a detachable nvidia GPu built into the keyboard). I did have to tweak some things in the driver to pick the default GPu. I don’t remember exactly how I did it back then and I’m not sure if it’s relevant any longer. I’m sure it’s better now that USB-C docks provide acceleration as well without needing to be connecting directly to the output device.
I’m sure anything and all of these datacenter systems will eventually find creative places in the aftermarket.
I hope someone turns these adapter boards into a consumer grade product, once that happens. Certainly has potential. The question is: can you game on these?
You can do CUDA on these, which is not nothing. With that you can run DOOM and pipe it to a video out. If there is a glut of cheap new versions of these after a bubble pop, perhaps the effort will be made to bodge these into pretending they’re a 5090 or something for the drivers, probably on Linux. It’s certainly possible, but significant work. If they’re cheap enough, and plentiful enough, life will find a way.
What they are good at, right now, is running local LLMs, scientific computing, etc., and it is done reasonably commonly by hobbyists. Likely also Photoshop and similar if you want the pain of running them on windows.
A while back I was able to use an nvidia m40 as a GPU while using embedded intel as the primary video output. This worked back then because laptops with nvidia GPUs rely on this hybrid GPu setup built into windows to conserve power and optimize for apps that actually need acceleration (windows surface book had a detachable nvidia GPu built into the keyboard). I did have to tweak some things in the driver to pick the default GPu. I don’t remember exactly how I did it back then and I’m not sure if it’s relevant any longer. I’m sure it’s better now that USB-C docks provide acceleration as well without needing to be connecting directly to the output device.
I’m sure anything and all of these datacenter systems will eventually find creative places in the aftermarket.
Pretty sure those professional GPU computation modules don’t have any graphics output.