Reddit user runs 35B AI model on $35 nine-GPU mining rig
The rig's nine Nvidia P106-100 cards, bought off Avito, all worked on first boot and provide 54GB of VRAM.
A Reddit user bought a nine-GPU crypto mining rig found in a garage for a negotiated 3,000 rubles, about $35, and ran a 35-billion-parameter AI model on it locally, according to Tom's Hardware.
All nine Nvidia P106-100 GPUs in the rig worked on the first try, giving the setup 54GB of VRAM in total. The buyer ran Qwen3.6-35B-A3B in Ollama at over 30 tokens per second.
The rig was listed on the Russian classifieds site Avito. The seller refused a pre-purchase test, and the price was negotiated down without one.
Each P106-100 card carries 6GB of GDDR5 and was originally introduced around mid-2017. In the current setup the cards sit alongside a weak Celeron CPU and very little system memory.
Planned upgrade
The buyer plans to move the hardware into a case that supports up to an i7-7700K CPU and 32GB of RAM, with room for 12 GPUs. On Nvidia's developer blog, the company says CUDA 13.0 removed offline compilation for GPUs below compute capability 7.5, and that driver branch 580 is the final branch to support pre-CC 7.5 GPUs; security updates for Pascal GPUs are supported through October 2028.
よくある質問
How much did the nine-GPU mining rig cost?
The buyer paid a negotiated 3,000 rubles, about $35, after finding the rig listed on the Russian classifieds site Avito.
What AI model ran on the rig?
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, a 35-billion-parameter model, ran locally in Ollama at over 30 tokens per second.
How much VRAM do nine Nvidia P106-100 cards provide?
Each P106-100 has 6GB of GDDR5, so the nine cards in the rig total 54GB of VRAM.