Benchmarking 15 "E-Waste" GPUs with Modern Workloads
The author benchmarks decommissioned enterprise NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to determine their viability for modern homelab GPU nodes. The analysis compares performance, cost, and power efficiency of older hardware against modern requirements.
Why it matters
It provides a cost-effective roadmap for hobbyists and researchers to build high-performance computing clusters using affordable, secondary-market hardware.
Decommissioned NVIDIA enterprise GPUs are one of the last remaining sources of idle VRAM. K80 with 24GB of GDDR5 sells for $60, P100-16GB for around $75 and V100-16GB for under $200. Shortcomings and all, it’s important to understand if we can utilize these widely available cards in the modern era. This project to benchmark tesla GPUs has been in the works for almost a year and over the winter I was able to spend many kilowatt hours heating up my studio with GPUs.
Focuses on hardware benchmarking and practical utility without ideological bias.
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