Comment by mk_stjames
14 hours ago
The prices of these boards have gone up it seems since the knowledge on how to bring them up and effectively utilize them has proliferated.
After the crypto miners dumped them (that was, what, 2 years ago?), I saw one of the entire rack systems on eBay- I think they held 12 of these in one rack on a common backplane - for $800. (or maybe less?)
That's $66 per BC-250.
I checked eBay and they are now around 200 usd and up. All the sellers located in the US and Canada, so a bit more involved for hackers looking into building one from Europe. I still pulled the trigger on one, not sure I will use it much but I'm definitely gonna have a lot of fun building it!
Support for the board is also way better than before. Now you can customize RAM assigned to cpu/gpu, idle power, in some cases unlock cores, distros work out of the box, etc.
And the alternative of getting a gpu, cpu, ram, storage is like 5 times as expensive.
You're welcome. I was the one who uploaded the firmware mods.
The CU's is genius though, I didn't know about that.
Well, thank you very much, then!
Right now the same situation happens with CMP 170HX.
These GPUs physically have 64GB RAM but locked to 8GB RAM. You can unlock all 64GB RAM with a patched driver.
They used to cost $200-250 but now cost $700+.
I bought a full rack for $240 (free shipping) Thanksgiving day 2024 - got lucky!
It was a box of 12 and 6 shared one of 2 PSUs in the box. Each board was effectively an independent "server".
Yeah, too expensive now for what it is