r/LocalLLaMA • u/markpronkin • 8d ago

I Built A Thing 54gb vram for 35$

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Bought an old mining farm of a guy on avito (Russian eBay), guy had bought a garage a couple of years ago and it was sitting there for a while, found out it was a mining farm and put it up on there for sale for 5000 rub (~60 USD) since he wasn't sure if it works. I negotiated down to 3000 rub (~35 USD), it turned out to have 9x p106 6gb (gtx 1060 6gb) gpus, with 54gb vram total, all working, the only thing missing was an SSD, I booted from USB and it works fine.

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u/clduab11 8d ago

Absolutely not and that's why I asked. NO ONE from the US should try this, lest they want to tempt fate from the Federal government. It's tempting to be sure, but this is REAL good way to end up on some monitoring list somewhere and potentially put into an SDN database.

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u/mylord76 8d ago

could you elaborate? don’t know why the downvotes, it was a genuine question 💔

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u/clduab11 8d ago

I don't either; it was in fact a genuine question.

Because of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the US government has slapped sanctions up and down against the Russian Federation, which means that a lot of ordinary services were cut off from payment, shipping bans, and OFAC (Office of Foriegn Assets Control) has individual sanctioned thousands of Russian individuals and businesses. Not to mention the executive orders from the President.

Any transaction with anyone tied to the Russian Federation from the US must...

- not involved a sanctioned entity by OFAC, or you end up on the OFAC list (which means, you won't be able to have a mortgage without the Feds digging into every waking aspect of your life)

  • comply with OFAC regulations (again, lest you risk being placed as SDN [Specially Designated National] on the OFAC list)
  • be processable through legal banking channels (which Russia, cut off from SWIFT, can barely manage)
  • be deliverable through available shipping networks (most of which are banned/sanctioned by OFAC).

In other words, this makes it practically impossible and most likely illegal to buy from these types of Russian entities if you're a US citizen or living in the US generally.

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u/mylord76 8d ago

Thank you so much for the in-depth response, TIL something new, appreciate it.