I made a portable render farm for 3D Rendering a few years ago. It was used for production (short term jobs) and then used as a test bed for a larger production setup (using proper enterprise hardware) when not on jobs.
I’m changing paths so I now have a bunch of hardware sitting in the corner that I’m wondering what to do with.
Hardware:
18x MS-01 i9-13000H with 96GB RAM, Samsung PM983 1.92TB (Ceph) and WD SN850X 2TB (Local Cache), Patriot 512GB (OS)
6x MS-A2 Ryzen 9 9955HX with 96GB RAM, 2x Samsung PM983 1.92TB (Ceph) and Patriot 512GB (OS)
18x Gigabyte Turbo 3090
6x 1600W PSU’s for GPU’s
4x QNAP QNAP QSW-M7308R-4X - 100Gbe > LACP 2x10Gbe for Network
4x QNAP **QSW-M2108R-2C for Corosync & MGMT Network
Each setup is a portable rack (SKB Case) of 6 machines, 1x 3090 per MS-01 via C-Payne PCIe adapters. It’s only 8 lanes but for rendering PCIe link speed doesn’t matter. The 6x MS-A2’s are for all the MGMT servers with no GPU’s. The MS-01’s just ran a singles WIndows VM for rendering. It was all running on Proxmox with a Squid Ceph Cluster. I have 2x 208v 20A circuits that run the setup with the cards slightly reduced on max wattage via Nvidia smi.
Looking for some thoughts and ideas on what to do with the setup now. Happy to try experiments / testing. Or sell them on ebay for parts as “in this economy” is now on my side! I’m going to install Proxmox 9.2 first off, try the new Tentacle CEPH and look to get a better clustered SMB setup working (with case insensitive cephfs file systems, for windows vm, running on the new erasure coded CEPH performance updates)
Other Options I’m thinking:
- Build a massive EXO AI Cluster and play with hosting multiple models, agents etc behind my main work machine (Blackwell 6000).
- Sell for parts
- Rent out GPU’s (In Cali so power is NOT cheap and the cards need to be power limited to around 250W if they all run full tilt to avoid power spikes reseting the cards on the same PSU).
- Stupid sized home lab.
- Sell the whole thing as a package.
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Well, you could absolutely use some of this for LLM workloads, but if you’ve already got a blackwell 6000, you’ll probably feel a bit underwhelmed with this hardware, unless you’re actually planning on running all of them at once. But, with CA power, you’ll be hurting even just leaving those rigs at idle.
I think there would definitely be people in this community interested in buying either parts or entire units. You might be able to sell a box or two as a whole unit.
Selling all this for parts would be a lot of work. If there is one thing we don’t get more of on this earth it is time.
The 3090s will be easy to offload individually. But selling individual SSD is not something I would bother with. Maybe make a post on r/homelabsales and try to offload some MS-01/MS-02 in bundles. Other than ebay I don’t know were there is a large enough buyer base to pay market value.
I’d be building the Son of Anton personally. That’s a heck of a pile of computers. F@H 100% would be my idle usage, and LLM workloads(you have a gold mine in DDR)
Then start getting more GPU’s!
They wouldn’t be really fast, but 6packs would allow a model per rack.
Googling shipping prices from Cali … Oh right international is dead in the water 
3090s and SSDs will be easy, both are in high demand.
If you have a person that you trust, consignment is the way.
If you don’t, take the loss and sell bulk.
Cheers for all the thoughts.
The units are in shock mounted SKB 9U Cases….they can travel!
The first iteration of this was a proper Son of Anton monster….this was a test setup…the final result was much nicer and works really well.
I think selling off the bundles of the MS-01’s, with 96GB RAM and the WD SN850x as a package is the winner. Then the GPU’s and Switches can go on ebay themselves. Otherwise the hassle of packaging and postage is a nightmare.
Going to keep the 6x MS-A2’s for a homelab setup with the Micron 7450 1.92TB Drives (Forgot I got Micron and not Samsung in the end!). Keeping the whole rig seems pointless in today’s market….as much fun as it would be to play with.
Shock proof racks are really cool stuff. If I ever visit the US and A again I will bring one back from military surplus with all that patina that makes them even cooler looking.
Edit and when you say mobile render farm. This is what I imagine the transport looking.
I was gonna say, with all those Minisforums you could sell some on-demand compute if the numbers work out for you. If that were to work out, most people would use that for AI so, hell, you could make the whole cluster for selling giant model inference. Hell, models, you’ve got that much.
But since you’re selling them…. What’s your eBay?
Man, those turbo 3090s…absolutely perfect in a pair for local 48GB LLM workloads. You wouldn’t have any trouble moving them on, if that’s on your mind - currently, the only source for them is China.
Right, I have actually seen on eBay, some 3080 turbos from China that have a memory mod to make them 20GB, they were like 700.
Waiting to see if someone is going to take the whole lot as a bulk.
If not I’ll post the ebay link or r/homelabsales
