Reddit user pays $35 for a crypto mining rig left in a garage and gets 54GB of VRAM at 65 cents per GB
- ID
- 34447
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 12 Oct 2026, 6:00 PM
- Fetched
- 12 Oct 2026, 7:18 PM
- Provider
- Tom's Hardware
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/reddit-user-pays-usd35-for-a-crypto-mining-rig-left-in-a-garage-and-gets-54gb-of-vram-at-65-cents-per-gb-the-first-test-for-2017-era-gpus-a-35b-parameter-ai-model-running-locally-at-over-30-tokens-per-second
- Source URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/feeds/all
Summary
- Score
- 5.5
- Created
- 12 Oct 2026, 7:19 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- ai_ml_learnersdevelopersvibe_coders
What happened
A Reddit user reportedly paid $35 for a crypto mining rig abandoned in a garage, giving them 54GB of VRAM at roughly 65 cents per GB, according to Tom's Hardware. The first test on the 2017-era GPUs ran a 35B-parameter AI model locally at over 30 tokens per second. The article body available here is mostly site navigation and subscription prompts, so details like the exact GPU model, the model used, and the benchmark setup are not stated.
Why it matters
It gives you a concrete price-per-VRAM benchmark: 65 cents per GB, versus what you'd pay for a new consumer GPU or per-token cloud inference. If you're building local-inference boxes for agent or LLM work, this is a number to compare against before buying new hardware — but note the article doesn't name the GPU model, the quantisation, or the software stack, so treat 30 tokens/sec on a 35B model as an unverified single report rather than a spec. There is no Malaysia-specific detail in the text.
Discussion angle
Is price-per-GB of VRAM a useful buying metric for used mining cards, or does the missing detail — driver support, cooling, power draw, whether these cards even work as general compute — make the 65 cents/GB headline misleading? Ask anyone in the group who has bought ex-mining hardware what actually broke.