$1,400
Total Cost
48GB
Total VRAM
2x
GPUs
Nairobi AI Dev's Used 3090 Box ($1,400)
Kwame Otieno
Kenya
A scrappy dual used RTX 3090 setup sourced from eBay and local Lagos resellers. The 48GB of pooled VRAM punches well above its weight class on Llama 3 70B Q4_K_M. Designed to be repairable, cool in 32C ambient, and quiet enough to sit in a one-bedroom.
Build Log
"I spent six weeks watching used RTX 3090 listings on Jiji and eBay, finally getting two for around $650 each shipped. The hardest part wasn't the GPUs — it was the PSU. A 1300W unit that wouldn't ship to Lagos. I had it forwarded through a friend in Dubai. The open frame is a luggage-rack chassis I welded together with a local fabricator for about $40. Total runs under 800W under inference load and stays at 72C in 32C ambient. Llama 3 70B Q4 at 16 tok/s is honestly enough for my agent workflows. I'm now fine-tuning small Yoruba and Swahili adapters using QLoRA across both cards."
Llama 3 70B Q4_K_M
16.4tokens/sec
Mixtral 8x7B Q5
38tokens/sec
SD 1.5 (512x512)
92img/min