I want to host some LLM’s locally and use more advanced models. Since new hardware is out of the question, I think I should be able to pull something off buying some yesteryear equipment on ebay etc. Did anybody attempt such a project? Does it scale horizontally? (I.e. can I connext two boxes to overcome single box slowness?)
Ram if a big driver of what models you can run with vram at a premium. Equipping 2 separate boxes with enough ram to load advanced models may be more expensive than just equipping one faster machine.
On the larger models even with ssd swap I can’t even get them to fully load on my 16gb of ram.
well, I intend on scavenging for parts as I can’t really afford today’s prices. And since I don’t really know what should I grab as minimum specs I don’t even know what to look for. I could try to look for old(er) gaming rigs people sell or maybe there are some business workstations that may be sold in bulk. Either way, knowing what’s the minimum viable set of specs for running qwen or claude locally would be helpful