Running 177B Models at Home on a 2015 Dell Workstation
This is the build log and runbook behind my local LLM box: a retired Dell Precision T7910, three used Tesla V100s, and the path I took to run a 177B-parameter model at 524K context on 2017 silicon. What this is: the full build log of my local LLM rig, start to finish. I replaced the CPUs, added three datacenter GPUs to a workstation, fought the power and cooling, and got llama.cpp serving a 177B Qwen hybrid and a 284B DeepSeek at home. I use llama.cpp for inference and V100 GPUs for compute. If you want to know whether a retired workstation can carry modern models, this is the honest answer. ...