The odds were against it. The seller, who had listed the rig on the Russian classifieds site Avito after finding it in a damp garage years earlier, refused a pre-purchase test, so the buyer negotiated the price down and took the risk. The weak Celeron CPU and PCIe 2.0 x1 slots limit the system, and the result leans heavily on the model choice: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is a mixture-of-experts model with 35B parameters in total but only 3B activated, so it suits the cards' strengths. Dense models are a different story, with a 4-bit Llama 3.3 70B expected to crawl at around 4.5 tokens per second.

The deal looks striking next to modern hardware: an RTX 5090 launched at $1,999 with 32GB of VRAM and 1,792 GB/s of bandwidth, so the rig has 1.7 times the memory for under 2% of the price, though each card moves about a ninth of the data. Electricity is the other catch, with the nine cards estimated at a combined 1,080W, though the buyer says power is free for them and generally cheap in Russia.

There is a clock ticking on the platform. Nvidia says driver branch 580 is the final one to support GPUs below compute capability 7.5, which includes these Pascal-generation cards, and CUDA 13.0 has dropped offline compilation for them, although security updates run through October 2028. The buyer's next step is a new case that fits 12 GPUs and an i7-7700K with 32GB of RAM, which would allow three more cards and 72GB of VRAM in total.