AI Workloads
This machine has four PCIe Gen3 x16 slots connecting directly to two CPUs, resulting in very high performance for up to four GPU cards.
It is rare to find motherboards that expose ALL four PCIe x16 channels on the CPUs (shown above) to external GPUs via four onboard PCIe x16 slots (shown below).
The prices of GPUs with large amounts of VRAM are very expensive, with the above four PCIe x16 slots we can combine:
- 4 cheaper GPUs to create 1 virtual GPU with 4 times the VRAM
- 3 cheaper GPUs to create 1 virtual GPU with 3 times the VRAM
- 2 cheaper GPUs to create 1 virtual GPU with 2 times the VRAM
Mixing GPUs of different sizes is possible but not recommended.
We are focusing on 16GB GPUs as examples here due to their price/performance ratio as at early 2025, but using larger sizes are possible e.g. consumer grade 24GB GPUs can be used to create a 96GB virtual GPU at much lower cost than a single GPU that has 96GB VRAM.