Currently I have a 4090x2 and I am looking to upgrade my machine. Due to well known reasons, the price of 4090 and 3090 is insanely high right now, and I see another option: magic modding a 3080 with 20g of vram.
My aim is to use qlora to fine tune a 34B model, and I see that the requirement for fine tuning a 34B model using a single card from qlora is 24g vram, and the price of 4090x2 is about equal to 3080 20g x8. so what would be a better choice for a multi-card?
4090x2 or 3080 20g x8?
Does your motherboard even have 8 PCIe slots? You’ll be needing server boards. Even workstation boards typically support only 7 (and can’t fit them all due to size)
Using a PCIe splitter cable, split the PCIe 4.0x16 x1 into PCIe 4.0x8 x2. And all gpu use a PCIe extension cable.
I would recommend against this, not to say you are incapable o lr wouldn’t figure it out, but it’s a head ache. Just the power consumption on something like this alone would drive you to a sizable power bill, not to mention lack of any kind of Nvlink, your 4090 setup is a much better option in my opinion.