GPU/hardware advice for an HP DL380 Gen10

Posted by Decent-Occasion-2720@reddit | LocalLLaMA | View on Reddit | 3 comments

Need your GPU/hardware advice for an HP DL380 Gen10 in homelab

I’m an (quite new) local LLM enthusiast, and with the new models realeased last month, that encouraged me to upgrade my setup. But i don’t want to blow my budget on hardware.

Currently, I have an HP DL380 gen 10 with two Xeon Gold 6242 (16 cores each) and 144 GB of DDR4 2933 MHz. It only supports PCIe Gen 3, and I added an RTX 3060 12 GB.

I had a 5060 Ti 16 GB, better, but not as good as expected.
Unfortunately, the 5060 died ten days later. I returned it to the vendor and was reimbursed.

What is the best (cheapest) option, since that's for homelab every crazy things are possible even they was not recommended in HPE documentation.....

Options considering:
- another 3060 12 GB, cheapest
- 5060 Ti 16 GB, because 16 GB
- 5070 12 GB
- 9060 XT 16 GB
- Intel Arc A770 16 GB (Resizable BAR needed ??)
- upgrade CPUs to xeon 8260 24 core

(My targeted use case: Qwen 3.5 122B with LlamaCPP + OpenCode, up to 20 tok/s on a 100k-token context. Currently, I reach \~10 tok/s with the 122B Q2 XL and still get very usable results despite quantization.)

I've read many speculation on GPU on HPE server, so if you have or had experience with GPUs on HPE DL380, please share your experience !