Reddit User Acquires Inexpensive Crypto Mining Rig for AI Model Operation
A Reddit user, markpronkin, reportedly purchased an old crypto mining rig for approximately $35 (3,000 rubles) after discovering it in a damp garage. Despite the rig's rusty condition and the seller's refusal for a pre-purchase test, all nine Nvidia P106-100 GPUs, offering a combined 54GB of VRAM, were found to be functional. The user successfully ran a 35-billion-parameter AI model, Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, locally using Ollama, achieving over 30 tokens per second. The P106-100 GPUs are Pascal-generation cards, each with 6GB of GDDR5, originally released around mid-2017. While CUDA 13.0 no longer supports offline compilation for GPUs below compute capability 7.5, security updates for these cards are guaranteed through October 2028. The system's main limitation is a weak Celeron CPU and minimal system memory, and the PCIe 2.0 x1 motherboard slots also present a bottleneck.
