I think you need to be very clear about what your goal is -- just playing with different "real" hardware, or running some small models as experiments, or trying to do semi-serious work with LLMs? How much do you want to spend on hardware and electricity in the long run, and how much are you willing to "lose"? e.g. if a setup turns out to be not very useful and hard to repurpose it because you already have too many computers, and you need to either sell it or throw it away, what's your limit?
Depending on your answer, I suspect you might want to use Google Colab Pro/Paperspace/AWS/vast.ai instead of building your own hardware.
Comments
I think you need to be very clear about what your goal is -- just playing with different "real" hardware, or running some small models as experiments, or trying to do semi-serious work with LLMs? How much do you want to spend on hardware and electricity in the long run, and how much are you willing to "lose"? e.g. if a setup turns out to be not very useful and hard to repurpose it because you already have too many computers, and you need to either sell it or throw it away, what's your limit?
Depending on your answer, I suspect you might want to use Google Colab Pro/Paperspace/AWS/vast.ai instead of building your own hardware.