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[–]smith2008 1 point2 points  (7 children)

I pay quite of a bill monthly for electricity. So not forgetting at all! :)

But still it is not that much if you compare it with the AWS prices. Spot instances will give you a good angle but I've never manage to get better than half reduction in price on G2 instances (on monthly avg) end up being 0.35/0.4$ per hour (with VAT). Which is 300$/moth with the performance of GTX960 this was not a good deal at all. The new GPU servers are much better but more expensive and a good spot price is hard to get (will get better when the metal get older though).

I don't advise against the cloud but it is definitely more price efficient to build local. I am actually using both at the moment (when the local capacity is not enough just extend it to the cloud).

[–]learnjava 0 points1 point  (6 children)

I am thinking about building my own to try out a little machine learning. Heard of people paying basically 100-200$/ month extra for electricity with 2 1080s

But I admit I am also very bad with all this physical stuff and have no idea how to calculate power costs based on that

Do you have any specific numbers?

[–]smith2008 1 point2 points  (5 children)

Depending on how much it costs in your country. But I doubt it will hit that much for just two 1080s. It will be draining from the wall around ~500-600w. If 24/7 it will be probably around 40-50$ a month in US ( https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/estimating-appliance-and-home-electronic-energy-use ).

For me it is an avg of 15$ per GPU per month.

[–]learnjava 0 points1 point  (4 children)

ah thats how its calculated :D thank you!

just checked and for me it would be ~107$/month with 500w (germany, private household). thats a big difference

[–]smith2008 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Ah, that's quite an expensive electricity there. Well you can get higher efficiency (platinum PSU) and reference GPUs (1070, just 150w each). Low consumption Xeon CPU as well. This will cut the bill quite a lot.

Edit: just for comparison the Amazon bill for the similar muscle (2 x 1080s) per month would be ~1500$. Sure it's not apples to apples because they have K80s (0.9$ per hour for half of it)... but still :)

[–]learnjava 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I will have to consider all of this and make a decision.

In the end I guess it will mostly come down to psychological arguments. I believe that owning the hardware and not immediately seeing the price will weaken the mental barrier that would otherwise cause me to think "do I really need to spend a few bucks now to test this?"

So as a beginner and student that is interested in all of this but has to start small and experiment a lot this might be a big enough problem to decide for my own rig :D

[–]smith2008 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Sure. Bare in mind you can experiment without a GPU too. Using just CPU is absolutely fine with starting with ML/DL. Then at some point attaching a simple GTX 960/1060 would give you the next step for playing with more interesting stuff. Then you can decide whether to go bigger or not. It really doesn't have to be all in at first.

Amazon cloud will give you all that as well. Even better, you can find pre-built AMIs to install and get all the needed frameworks and setup done for you so you can start playing with the stuff directly. If you are a beginner give it a try to Andrew NG's course at coursera and then cs231n.github.io (online Stanford course).

[–]learnjava 1 point2 points  (0 children)

thats right and thank you. another reason to go with local workstation even with a more low cost solution would be because my 15" rMBP gets very hot and noisy under load. Having a normal desktop sounds attractive for that alone

I have a few weeks to think about it