Large rigs (8 or more cards)

Several members run eight or more CMP 170HX cards from one host, and a few run 16 to 45. This page collects what they posted: how many cards are worth it, where hosts run out of PCIe lanes, the builds on record by size, and what that many cards cost in heat, power and noise. Most of these rigs split models with pipeline parallel over PCIe (Parallelism over the PCIe link). Switch-board hosts are on PCIe switch boards, the most common 8-card server on Gigabyte G292-Z20, mining-case builds on Octominer X12 Ultra builds and enclosures on Chassis builds.

How many cards make sense

How many cards: 8 to 10 as the practical ceiling

Contested

2026-07-28, CUTE: his plan for GLM-5.2 int4 or bf16 at scale was 4 servers of 8 cards each over InfiniBand. Kimi K3 needs 32 cards, GLM-5.2 on 8 to 16 cards is "kind of ridiculous", and 8 to 10 cards is the practical maximum. He advised against mixing AMD and NVIDIA in one rig: possible, but more complicated. Source: @cute_sc2, 2026-07-28
2026-09-13: CUTE planned 10 cards to run GLM 5.3 int4 with multiple agents at 256k context. SkirtChaser noted that 10 does not divide well for parallelism, and CUTE agreed that 10 cards need "trickery and dark magic" to run well without PCIe 4.0. segmond runs 12 cards and says some people run 32. Source: @segmond, 2026-09-13
Source: @skirtchaser, 2026-09-13
2026-09-18: Miséricorde sees little point beyond 2 to 4 cards. Morrowmake: 8 is a good number; above that the value falls off hard unless PCIe 4 is unlocked, and DGX Sparks may be better value. Source: @wakeupmbrc1, 2026-09-18
Source: @voidgiraffe, 2026-09-18

GLM as the practical ceiling for CMP rigs; 8 to 10 card plans

bayley_w said GLM is at the limit of what CMPs can do: it runs on his rig, it is no Claude Opus, but it is reliable. DeeJay called GLM medium-sized and about the most he would run on CMPs, said that past 10 cards there are better options, and planned a 10-card build (4 owned, 1 on the way). Morrowmake had 4 cards and wanted 8 for GLM but balked at 1,600 USD. Schaka suggested waiting, since an expected Qwen 3.8 120B dense or MoE model might make GLM unnecessary.

Reported
Source: @bayley_w, 2026-08-21
Source: @deejay9983, 2026-08-21
Source: @voidgiraffe, 2026-08-21
Source: @schakaqt, 2026-08-21

What 8 cards deliver, in Con3po's view: about 60 tok/s on large models, 100+ on flash-class

Con3po built eight 170HX plus a Radeon 7900 XTX on a PEX88096 switch board running 8x8, with a push-pull system venting outdoors so the heat stays out of his room (video posted). In his view eight cards give about 60 tok/s on large models, and not at full context, while flash-class models run at 100+ tok/s with plenty of KV cache. He considers anything above 60 tok/s decode plenty and 100+ nice. He named no models and posted no benchmark logs.

Reported
Source: @con3po7016, 2026-09-22
Source: @_arcanum_, 2026-09-22

Four-card rigs at stock x4: owners who stopped at four

jjb sold his R9700s and an RTX 4000 Pro to build one rig with four standard x4 (unmodded) 170HX cards and does not regret it, though there are too many models to benchmark (2026-09-06). Waka324 runs 5 cards: 4 for "big" flash models and 1 for ComfyUI. Ikyo, with 4 unmodded cards arriving, was weighing PP across all four against selling two for Intel B70, AMD 9700 or RTX 3090 cards, and asked how people cool four cards together; nobody answered in that thread.

Reported
Source: @ikyo, 2026-09-06
Source: @jjb01957, 2026-09-06
Source: @cmdrwaka324, 2026-09-06

Lanes, hosts and topology

Lane budgets and board choices for many cards (H11SSL-i, Pro Sage, X99 mining boards, Threadripper)

1a2b3c0967 bought about 20 cards and planned 8 or more in a Zen 3 server board at Gen2 x16 with TP, aiming for 40 tok/s on GLM int4 or IQ3; he has Supermicro H11SSL-i boards. diabeetee built on an ASUS Pro Sage board instead of splitter setups. Dual X99 boards from Alibaba come in 6-slot and 8-slot versions. Samuel Hayden: 20 cards need RoCE or RDMA and "a 3x threadripper or xeon setup with ~128 lanes each". DeeJay: 128 lanes allow about 7 cards at x16 or 28 at x4 (8 at x16 with no NVMe), so two PCs at Gen2 x16 linked by fast networking may be better.

Reported
Source: @1a2b3c0967, 2026-07-27
Source: @diabeetee, 2026-07-27
Source: @ju5t5omedude, 2026-07-27
Source: @samuel_hayden., 2026-07-27
Source: @deejay9983, 2026-07-27

16 cards per server is the practical ceiling: the 32-card and 45-card builds

RH-3D is cutting his 32-card rig to 16: two 16-card servers are easier to maintain than one with 32 (2026-10-14). BackwardsMiner ran 45 GPUs for a day on an Intel 11th-gen CPU until the BIOS reported that not enough PCIe lanes were left. His 32-card build used an Intel NUC 9 Extreme as the host over PLX switches, with Dell server PSUs (about 2k USD; HP units were 60 % more at the time) on breakout boards. That rig is now 16 cards, to cut heat and power. In the mining era he bought about 60 CMP 100-210 at 110 USD each. RazK pointed to BackwardsMiner's short video of the build. RH-3D documented his 32-card rig before cutting it, in video #005 (next section). A host that runs out of PCIe resources is covered on Card not detected or BAR allocation fails.

Reported
Source: @rh3dai, 2026-08-31
Source: @rh3dai, 2026-10-14
Source: @backwardsminer, 2026-10-14
Source: @port00, 2026-10-14
Source: @mlx4, 2026-10-14

Builds with 30 or more cards

The 32-card "Digital Universe" build and a 52-card owner

Petri Krohn shared on 2026-08-15 the YouTube video "#001 DIY HOME SUPERCOMPUTER with 2TB of VRAM for VLLM", a home vLLM build from 32 CMP 170HX. 2 TB in total implies cards unlocked to 64 GB, that is the 8 GB card. He proposed a TOP500-style list of home-lab supercomputers, and segmond wanted to see real workloads run on it. On 2026-08-16 philow said he could not wait to see "the guy with 32" try Kimi, and Moliminous named the channel ("digital universe"); he found the videos a bit dry but valued someone actually benchmarking models. On 2026-09-01 segmond reported that the 32-card build was finished, and ju5t5omedude thought the builder had joined the server; no specs were given. On 2026-10-08 Con3po shared a screenshot of a YouTuber with 32 water-cooled 170HX cards (channel Digital Universe), who GlobalApathy says is in the Discord; Takka answered "I have 52, and a filthier environment". Both mentions name the same channel and the same card count, so they are treated as one build here. The builder's own posts are in the next section.

Reported 8 GB
Source: @petrikrohn_26497, 2026-08-15
Source: @segmond, 2026-08-15
Source: @.philow, 2026-08-16
Source: @moliminous, 2026-08-16
Source: @segmond, 2026-09-01
Source: @ju5t5omedude, 2026-09-01
Source: @con3po7016, 2026-10-08
Source: @spectakkular, 2026-10-08
Source: @globalapathy, 2026-10-08

RH-3D's 32-card, 2 TB rig at Gen2 x16 (video #005, Digital Universe channel)

RH-3D posted his video #005, "32x CMP170HX 2TB VRAM Gen2.0@16x Deep diving into the numbers" (YouTube), with performance data from a 32-card rig of cards unlocked to 64 GB, as evidence that "Gen 2.0 16x Is realistic" (2026-08-31). His cards are water-cooled; he has had the CMP waterblocks for about 3 years, bought at roughly 140 EUR each. Rickcal took part in the thread. On 2026-09-30 Nea Popa pointed to the same video on the YouTube channel Digital Universe: it covers interconnect speeds but has no LLM benchmarks, and reala guessed that PP across 32 cards would be very slow; Zoodasa took part. The host platform is not described. His Gen2 x16 bandwidth figure is on Benchmarks; water-cooling practice is on Water cooling.

Reported 8 GB
Source: @rh3dai, 2026-08-31
Source: @rrickk420, 2026-08-31
Source: @rh3dai, 2026-08-31
Source: @neapopa, 2026-09-30
Source: @endbr64, 2026-09-30
Source: @reala7096, 2026-09-30

A 37-card water-cooled 170HX rig with 2.36 TB of VRAM (Czech miner, YouTube)

Petri Krohn shared a YouTube video about a Czech miner who had 37 CMP 170HX mining cards running on his own solar power (2026-08-07). The miner began rebuilding the rig as an AI machine aiming for 296 GB of VRAM (37 x 8 GB) and, after the unlock, has 2.36 TB (37 x 64 GB), "enough to run Kimi K3". Everything is water-cooled, and a follow-up video shows him building one 8-card unit.

Reported 8 GB
Source: @petrikrohn_26497, 2026-08-07

Other large holdings named on the Discord

Members named other large holdings without describing a rig. Red Panda Mining sits on about 600 cards, per giaki3003 (2026-07-28). A New Zealand miner with 70 cards asked on YouTube whether to sell them (linked by ju5t5omedude, 2026-08-30). CUTE has 21 cards, 10 of them active and the rest waiting for a system (2026-09-16). Petri Krohn pointed out that a member had posted a 12-card, 768 GB build on r/LocalLLaMA as "768gb vram for less than the price of one RTX 6000" (Reddit, 2026-09-18).

Reported
Source: @giaki3003, 2026-07-28
Source: @ju5t5omedude, 2026-08-30
Source: @cute_sc2, 2026-09-16
Source: @petrikrohn_26497, 2026-09-18

Builds with 10 to 16 cards

diabeetee's 16-card rig: Threadripper Pro 7955WX on an ASRock WRX90, all cards at x4

diabeetee built a second node on an ASRock WRX90 board with Phanteks T30 fans, laid out like his first, for the PCIe lanes (2026-08-12). The Noctua CPU cooler cannot be rotated on that board, so either the CPU exhausts onto the GPUs or the reverse; Studebaker suggested exhausting away from the GPUs, and bayley_w noted the irony of PCIe 5 lanes for Gen2 cards. PJ took part. By 2026-09-02 he had a large rig on a Threadripper 7955WX with an ASRock WRX90 WS in which some cards are x16-modded and some not; all run at x4, so it does not matter (no models loaded yet). On 2026-09-11 he showed the 16-card machine: ASRock WRX90 WS EVO with a Threadripper Pro 7955WX, slots split to x4 per card with AliExpress adapter cards. He stopped modding once he decided to run everything at x4. A second machine runs 4 cards at x16 and hosts DeepSeek V4 Flash. He paid about 1,350 USD per card on average, says the rig is "not as loud as i thought", and was downloading DeepSeek V4.1 Flash to test. chonsworth asked for an nvbandwidth run on it. Slot splitting is on Risers and bifurcation, the mod on PCIe x16 capacitor mod.

Reported
Source: @diabeetee, 2026-08-12
Source: @zingy90210, 2026-08-13
Source: @bayley_w, 2026-08-13
Source: @_studebaker_, 2026-08-13
Source: @chonsworth, 2026-09-11

segmond's 12-card rig: 768 GB on PCIe Gen2 x16, cards in an Octominer case with an EPYC DDR4 host outside

segmond runs 12 CMP 170HX cards for 768 GB of VRAM (64 GB each) and argues that many slower GPUs beat one fast GPU with less VRAM ("1 h100 80gb, 12 CMP 768gb") (2026-08-16). He is content with PCIe Gen2 x16 links and does not expect NVLink; Studebaker put the power at 12 cards x 250 W. segmond named GLM-5.2 as his favourite model at the time; Dino took part. He bought the 12 cards at 1,000 USD each. On 2026-09-01 he was waiting for MaxOnCloud cables to move them off an Octominer; by 2026-09-08 he had packed all 12 into the Octominer case with the Octominer motherboard removed and his own motherboard outside the case (photos posted). The host is a pre-Genoa EPYC with DDR4; he regrets not choosing Genoa, which DDR5 prices held him back from. 768 GB is just under what full GLM 5.3 needs (DeeJay guessed about 768 GB for W8A8), so he still could not run GLM 5.3 at full weights. On 2026-09-01 he said one more card would do it but he would not pay current prices, and on 2026-09-22 that he might add 1 or 2 more once he has a 220 V outlet. He wanted 32 cards for Kimi K3 but did not know how to connect them. The case conversion is on Octominer X12 Ultra builds.

Reported 8 GB
Source: @dino_38975, 2026-08-16
Source: @segmond, 2026-08-16
Source: @_studebaker_, 2026-08-16
Source: @segmond, 2026-09-01
Source: @deejay9983, 2026-09-01
Source: @segmond, 2026-09-08
Source: @segmond, 2026-09-22

RedPandaMining's rental rigs on Vast.ai: a 10-GPU inference rig, and 6x 10 GB cards at a 40 GB unlock

RedPandaMining put a 170HX rig on Vast.ai on 2026-08-13 for people to test, with no power limit, partly to see whether kernel and driver issues seen on SimplePod go away on Vast. bayley_w noted only 128 GB of host RAM for 10 GPUs and a low DLPerf score; RedPanda, with 2 TB of DDR4 coming, said the rig is for inference only, not training, until he does the x16 mod. On 2026-08-29 he listed a 6x CMP 170HX 10 GB rig on Vast.ai (unverified host), each card at a "40gb unlock". Dino could not find it because Vast hides hosts with reliability below 90 by default: slide the host reliability filter fully left. Idle draw was about 500 W, about 1.00 USD a day at 0.083 USD/kWh; fully loaded, 8 cards draw about 2500 W, about 5 USD a day.

Reported 10 GB
Source: @redpandamining, 2026-08-13
Source: @bayley_w, 2026-08-13
Source: @dino_38975, 2026-08-29

Eight-card builds

Three of the builds below sit in a Gigabyte G292-Z20; the server itself (risers, PSUs, fans, switch layout) is described on its page.

SirBAM-a-lot: 8 modded 8 GB cards in a Gigabyte G292-Z20 under Proxmox, GLM-5.2 Q4_K_XL at 13-14 tok/s

SirBAM-a-lot passed eight modded CMP 170HX 8 GB cards through to a VM on Proxmox in a Gigabyte G292-Z20, and all eight unlocked without issue. He loaded GLM-5.2-Q4_K_XL entirely in VRAM (he wrote "320GB") with layer split and got 13-14 tok/s. With 20 concurrent sessions the rate dropped to 3 tok/s (per session or total is not stated). The links ran at Gen1 x4, and tensor parallel was a no-go at that width. One card was sent out for the capacitor x16 mod. He planned to grow toward 18 GPUs with Chinese PLX-based PCIe extensions (see PCIe switch boards). Passthrough setup is on Virtual machines and passthrough.

Reported 8 GB
Source: @sirbamalotx, 2026-07-21
Source: @impactic, 2026-07-21
Source: @deced_123, 2026-07-21

Zanooda: 8 cards in a Gigabyte G292-Z20, all shipped on VBIOS 92.00.6D.00.0A

Zanooda's cards arrived on 2026-09-09 from a seller he had earlier been unsure about; he said the seller was legit. He installed 8 cards in a Gigabyte G292-Z20 GPU rack server bought from servershop24.de and posted an nvidia-smi screenshot. All 8 report VBIOS 92.00.6D.00.0A and came that way from the seller; he flashed none. All 8 fit; he only had to adjust the power-cable adapters and plans to crimp shorter cables. Fans were throttled during transport, and idle temperatures were around 50 C. He put water-cooling the whole rig at about 2,000 USD or more. His eight-card recipe is DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on 8x 8 GB (Zanooda PP8).

Reported
Source: @zanooda, 2026-09-09
Source: @humandrone8721_60165, 2026-09-09

CUTE's machines: a G292-Z20 with 8 cards, a 10-GPU server being built, a 2-card workstation and a 400G link

CUTE's workstation (2026-08-14): Threadripper 7960X 24-core, 128 GB DDR5-6000, a Radeon 7900 XTX for display and 2x CMP 170HX for AI, all water-cooled. His GPU server is a Gigabyte G292-Z20 with an EPYC 7K62, 512 GB DDR4-3200 and 8x MI50 32 GB (which may be swapped for 170HX), with a planned second server of 10x CMP 170HX and 512 GB to 1 TB of RAM. Electricity at 26 cents/kWh drives his efficiency choices. By 2026-09-03 the G292-Z20 ran 8 cards (4 PCIe switches with 2 cards each) for GLM-5.3 Flash and Qwen3.8. The second, 10-GPU server was being built for big models such as GLM-5.3 at int4 or int8, and the workstation had 2 cards attached directly. The servers share a 400G link for a possible 16-GPU cluster. The G292 is easy to set up but very loud; noise-cancelling headphones did not help.

Reported
Source: @cute_sc2, 2026-08-14
Source: @cute_sc2, 2026-09-03
Source: @segmond, 2026-09-03

Heat, power and noise

Con3po's 8-card wood-box rig vented through a window

Con3po's rig (2026-09-17): 8 cards bought at about 1,200 USD on average (later described as about 1,000 USD each), cooled by 8x 80 mm fans in push-pull on 4 channels, plus an XTX card for gaming, inside a custom wood box with a window seal on a raised 20x20 aluminium extrusion frame, exhausting through a window. On 2026-09-23 it was dumping its heat straight outside, with a second row of fans pulling exhaust and the fly screen screwed to the wall; self-adhesive rubber tape on the shrouds noticeably changed the noise profile. Tokukarin warned that a window rig worth around 16k USD at current prices is a theft risk and suggested hiding or securing it. Fan and duct choices are on Fans and ducts.

Reported 8 GB
Source: @con3po7016, 2026-09-17
Source: @con3po7016, 2026-09-23
Source: @tokukarin, 2026-09-23
Source: @n3bs, 2026-09-23

Ten 8 GB cards at home: open frames, about 175 W each, a 2500 W envelope on 240 V, or sell for an SXM4 A100 server

rickflare has 10 CMP 170HX 8 GB cards left from mining (he once had 50) plus a rack and 240 V, and wants something quiet (2026-09-11). Jeremy (Ends): that many cards really want a high-static-pressure GPU server, which is deafening. With 120 mm fans the cards sit near their thermal limit nonstop and take a lot of space: about 2 open-frame mining racks (for example miningeek's open frames) for the cards plus a third for the board, maybe 4 or 5 cards per frame, with TDP turned down to about 175 W. Plan for a 2500 W thermal envelope and 240 V or two 120 V circuits; immersion is untried. He suggested renting RedPandaMining's roughly 10-GPU server to test first, or selling the cards and buying an SXM4 A100 40GB server with NVLink (an eBay listing), which holds its value better. Power limits are on Undervolting and power limits, temperature limits on Thermal limits.

Reported 8 GB
Source: @.rickflare, 2026-09-11
Source: @endsjeremy, 2026-09-11

Other GPUs at this scale

GLM 5.2 on 16x V100 SXM2 runs at about the speed of 8x 170HX

bayley_w runs GLM 5.2 on 16 V100 SXM2 GPUs in DGX-1 chassis at about the same speed as 8x 170HX across prefill, decode, concurrent decode and long-context decode. He uses TP4 x PP4 so the Chinese SXM2 risers work, with skinny kernels he tuned by aggressive microbenchmarking, and claims the fastest attention kernels on Volta. Each node idles at about 600 W and the 3U DGX-1s are loud, so they ended up water-cooled with an external radiator. He now shuts the V100s down because of idle power and leaves the 170HX rig on: his HVAC handles about 700 W but not the 1500+ W of the cluster, switch and filer together. Other cards compared with the 170HX are on Other CMP cards and other NVIDIA GPUs and How the 170HX compares.

Reported
Source: @bayley_w, 2026-08-21
Source: @schakaqt, 2026-08-21
Source: @deejay9983, 2026-08-21