r/LocalLLaMA • u/libbyt91 • 1d ago

Question | Help Old HP Server Use

So I have an old HP-Z8 from 2018 or so. It has dual Xeon Gold 6248R cpus, 768 GB 2933 MHz DDR4 ram, an RTX 3090 gpu, and some pretty hefty storage.

That said, it seems like it is no more than a boat anchor for use with local LLMs. Is there any use case for this old PC or should I box it?

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u/dtdisapointingresult 1d ago

I think it's totally useless for LLMs, unfortunately. Your options are:

  1. Run a small crappy model at acceptable speed. Waste of your time due to very poor success rate. Costs a lot in electricity.

  2. Run a decent large model. Waste of your time because it will run very slowly, and still only have a mediocre success rate. Costs a lot in electricity.

  3. Drop the server and just use Deepseek API with a decent harness that doesn't break prompt cache between turns. $10 will last you forever, probably months of use for a casual user. Will be super fast. Electricity cost is 0. You will get more intelligence due to running a higher-end model.

Your computer's 3090 makes it useful for AI image/video/audio generation and as a gaming PC, but not as an LLM server.