In my experience building these rigs over the years, 24GB is just gonna frustrate you with V3. Since you have 3500 bucks, maybe skip the dual setup and look for a used NVIDIA RTX A6000 48GB GDDR6. It pulls way less power than dual 3090s and keeps everything on one bus. Check r/hardwareswap or local liquidators... you can usually find them within your budget if you dig around.

Just catching up on this... honestly i'm pretty satisfied with my multi-gpu rig and it handles these massive models like a champ. For DeepSeek-V3, you gotta prioritize VRAM over raw speed or you're gonna have a bad time.

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24GB GDDR6X: Grabbing two of these used is the best bang for your buck. Having 48GB total lets you run the 4-bit quants which are way more reliable for coding.
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24GB GDDR6X: The 4090 is insanely fast but 24GB is basically a cage for a model this big. You'll have to compress it so much it'll probably start giving you garbage code. Since you got 3500 bucks, you'll actually have a ton of cash left over for a beefy PSU like the EVGA SuperNOVA 1600 P+ 80+ Platinum to handle the dual cards. Cap the power limit on the GPUs to 75% using software and you wont even have to worry about the old garage breakers. Its worked well for me and stays pretty quiet too.

> grabbing 2 used 3090s off ebay so i can get that 48gb vram pool but im worried about the power draw Unfortunately, running a dual setup on older residential circuits is frequently a recipe for disaster. I had significant issues with power spikes tripping my breakers last year, and it was not as stable as expected. Before you commit, how many amps is that garage circuit actually rated for? Also, are you prioritizing inference speed or the total context window?