Tom's Hardware reports that Reddit user markpronkin paid 3,000 rubles, about $35, for a rusty crypto mining rig found in a damp garage. The seller refused a pre-purchase test, but all nine Nvidia P106-100 GPUs worked on the first try. Those Pascal-generation cards, each with 6GB of GDDR5, total 54GB of VRAM — roughly 65 cents per gigabyte.
The buyer's first test was Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, a mixture-of-experts model with 35B total parameters and 3B active, running in Ollama at over 30 tokens per second. Dense models such as Qwen3.8-27B are unlikely to run as well, but any MoE model that fits entirely in VRAM should run decently. Performance is limited by a weak Celeron CPU, little system memory, PCIe 2.0 x1 slots, and roughly 192 GB/s of memory bandwidth per card; a 70B Llama 3.3 at 4-bit would likely hit only about 4.5 tokens per second.
The hardware has caveats: Pascal GPUs are below compute capability 7.5, CUDA 13 removed offline compilation for them, and driver branch 580 is the final supported branch, though security updates continue through October 2028. One commenter estimated the combined TDP at 1,080W, but the buyer says electricity is free or inexpensive in their case. The next step is moving the cards into a case that supports an i7-7700K, 32GB of RAM, and up to 12 GPUs, which would bring the total to 72GB of VRAM.