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As technologies change and adapt, we’re often left with seemingly useless junk that has nowhere to go. Certainly anyone still sitting on a pile of floppy disks feels this way sometimes, but odds are anyone who owns a mining ASIC or an NFT can attest to that as well. The trillions of dollars flowing into GPU-based data centers will likely become the next victim of this trend, so if you want to capitalize on the losses of some venture capitalist you’ll want to figure out a way to get GPUs meant for a server into your desktop doing useful work.
Of course, calling these devices GPUs is a bit of a stretch compared to the Radeon and GeForce cards many of us are used to using for gaming. These don’t even have a PCIe slot or video output, after all. But, as [] notes, the VRAM and GPU cores are very real and can still do useful work. An adapter board is able to mate a Tesla V100 SXM2 16 GB GPU to a standard PCIe slot, which solves the first problem, but the major downside from there is that the cooling fan for this unit was literally deafeningly loud. At 82 dB it was about as loud as a lawnmower, which is fine in a server rack but not great in a bedroom. [Oscar] found a way to tamp down the fan speed, making it usable in a home.
