Lawyer builds private AI server with eight used Nvidia V100 GPUs

A lawyer posted on Reddit about their private AI server built from eight used 2018-era Nvidia Tesla V100 data center GPUs so case files never have to leave the office. With two 4-card SXM2 NVLink boards, four PEX switches, and SlimSAS cables everywhere — plus one burnt power connector — the builder now runs the open DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model with every expert in GPU memory, at up to 215 tokens per second. The four-GPU boards cost about $2,400 apiece when the builder bought them.

The eight Tesla V100-SXM2-32GB cards, each with 32GB of HBM2 at 900 GB/s, plug into SXM2, Nvidia’s mezzanine socket for data center GPUs, rather than PCIe slots, and are split across two baseboards. Inside each board, all four cards are NVLinked — NVLink is Nvidia’s direct GPU-to-GPU link — for 128GB per board, but the two boards only communicate over PCIe. …