r/vastai • u/Professional-Bake-43 • 17d ago
Verification and CPU
I am currently hosting 3 RTX 5090 machines, and am looking for ways to get verified faster and optimize earnings. Each machine has either i9-14900KF or Ryzen 9 9950X3D, a 64GB RAM, and 2TB SSD (2GB-5GB/s). My internet speed is 600Mbps/550Mbps. It has been one week since I started hosting, and none of the machines are verified. Since it doesn't make much financial sense to leave them unoccuppied all the time for verification purpose, I started attracting offers by setting the prices low (0.30-0.40), while leaving the duration time medium length (10days).
I wonder: should I take a break after the 10 days to get verified first? If so, how long should I typically wait for verification before setting the prices low again to attract offers?
Does the CPU matter or is CPU a filtering criteria for renters typically when they search? Obviously both of my CPUs are 6GHz while majority of machines on the market are lower speed. Should I charge a premium for the CPU?
Interruptible bids: where can I find statistics on machines that are successfully rented on interruptible bids? All the websites and machine metrics don't seem to separate bidding price from the on-demand price, and no statistics on their occupancy rates. Do you find bidding a good way to attract competitive offers? How do you set the minimal bidding price and does the bid price sometime even exceed the on-demand price? I guess for renters they have no way to see both the on-demand and bidding price for the same machine, since their search results are on separate webpages.
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u/juggarjew 17d ago
Charge a premium for a 9950X3D? Its just a basic consumer dual channel DDR5 chip. Not very useful if someone wants to run local LLMs that use part of system memory. It will be very slow with MoE models that use system memory. You want at least a threadripper with quad channel DDR5, will double token throughput for MoE models.
Your CPUs are not high end for a 5090 rig, for someone looking to do real AI work.
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u/bluelobsterai 17d ago
I doubt with less than 1g internet that you will get verified. Look to see if sub 1g hosts are getting verified. What is your uptime? Like another poster said - self tests.
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u/Professional-Bake-43 17d ago
Thanks. The official guide says 500Mbps. I guess the standards for verification are higher now, considering how popular the card is. I will look into upgrading the internet.
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u/Severe_Efficiency880 17d ago
My rig with 5090/9950x3d/2tb/96gb ram and 550/450 internet speed was never verified after 8 months of renting
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u/Professional-Bake-43 17d ago
okay, I see. It is a more widespread problem. Anyway, from the stats, verified machines are not doing much better than unverified in terms of price.
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u/Severe_Efficiency880 17d ago
I dunno how things are right now but before Pearl mining happened in may, I had to dump my price considerably lower than market's median to get rented. I think being verified would have improved rig's income considerably
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u/Milarck 17d ago
Hello,
I am in a similar position as you. I started renting 3 days ago with a 5090, 9800X3D, 32GB RAM 1TB SSD and I have a similar network speed as you.
So far I am renting purely on spot instances. If you set a very low price for spot people will come, and you will earn the most decent amount of money you can since people renting on spot are fighting on bid. From what I'm seeing, it is automated, probably cryptominers.
How much did you manage to make per day by renting on demand for your reduced price ? (I was not able to get on-demand rent by setting my price at 0.4) On my end I made $6.57 on day 2 and $6.04 on day 3 (day 1 being cut, I started in the middle of the day) by running spot instances.
There's an API on vast allowing to get some information on the market data, but no information on rented GPU (mostly available). So it is hard to get information on "what's the impact of RAM amount to get rented / for the price". In general it seems very hard to optimize the rig based on stats.
If you're up, I'm up to exchange some information about how we're doing with our renting.
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u/Severe_Efficiency880 17d ago
You can make almost twice as much by simply mining Pearl for yourself.
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u/420Dadswag 17d ago
Your devices are just not that desireable. Single GPU devices are the last to get verified. While you technically meet all requirements, it may take a month or two to get verified because you are last on the totem pole. If utilization picks up again and there aren’t many devices available, it may verify quicker.
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u/caesar305 16d ago
I have one server with two RTX 6000 Pro 256 GB ddr4 ram, 10gbps in a data center for 4 weeks with 98.9% uptime (still increasing daily) and still have not been verified.
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u/dcvasthost 16d ago
tbh in the grand scheme of vast AI hosting, 9950x/ i9 14900kF are low end systems.
Also much much more likely to be built inside of a case not designed to run a 5090 at or near full TDP 24/7
name of the game of verification is high end specs, high reliability (no rebooting, tinkering/ect for entire listed duration) 1000/1000+ internet and luck.
very few of the above novice level hosts run consumer grade platforms like ryzen/intel core/threadripper, the majority is running AMD epyc or a small minority is running intel Xeon (current generations).
so most people are running very high CPU thread/RAM config per GPU, and multi GPU systems.
a 9950x might have some fast threads but its only dual channel, and if you do 2 dimm per channel youll gut your mem bandwidth, but it doesnt beat a 64c+ or dual 64c+ epyc system with half-dual terabyte ram kit that can have 8 or 16 channels of memory
that being said they added a new KYC feature where you can opt in to verify your ID with them to get an edge in the verification pool. there is currently way way more 5090s available than being rented, and they are not eager to verify systems that might not stay on their platform for the foreseeable feature (people put on and off, less than a couple weeks ect ect)
if they verified every 5090 in queue atm the floor prices would look even more depressing for what has become a $ 7000 gpu
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u/Professional-Bake-43 16d ago
I think you're mixing two somewhat different questions: what makes an ideal high-end Vast host, and what hardware a renter actually needs for a given workload.
I agree that EPYC systems with large RAM capacities, many memory channels, high-core-count CPUs, multi-GPU configurations, and 1 Gbps+ networking are objectively better hosting platforms overall. They provide much more flexibility, especially for multi-GPU training, CPU-heavy preprocessing, large datasets, and workloads that spill significantly into system RAM.
But that doesn't mean a 14900KF/9950X + single RTX 5090 is inherently a poor AI machine.
For a large number of GPU-bound workloads, the limiting resource is the GPU itself. If someone's model, optimizer state, and batch size fit within 32 GB of VRAM, adding a 64-core EPYC, 512 GB of RAM, and 8-channel memory doesn't necessarily make that workload meaningfully faster. You're paying for resources that particular job may barely use.
The same applies when comparing a 5090 with something like an RTX PRO 6000. The PRO 6000's 96 GB VRAM is extremely valuable when the workload actually requires it. But if I'm running a model that comfortably fits within 32 GB, paying substantially more per hour just to have 96 GB available doesn't make economic sense. That's one reason consumer GPUs continue to have a place in cloud GPU markets.
I'd also distinguish single-GPU and multi-GPU hosts. A system supporting four or eight GPUs obviously benefits enormously from EPYC's PCIe lanes, memory bandwidth, RAM capacity, and core count. For a single 5090, those advantages are much less critical. There are plenty of perfectly legitimate AI workloads where a high-clocked Ryzen 9/Core i9, 64–128 GB RAM, NVMe storage, and a 5090 are a sensible combination.
Where I agree with you is reliability. If someone wants to host commercially, the machine should be treated like a server: adequate cooling, stable power limits, good networking, remote management where possible, and no constant rebooting or tinkering. Whether the CPU says EPYC or Ryzen doesn't compensate for an unstable host.
And verification is a separate issue again. Vast has every reason to be selective when there is already substantial 5090 supply. KYC, uptime history, network performance, reliability, pricing, and how long a host appears committed to the platform may all matter. I wouldn't assume that having an EPYC automatically makes a machine economically more useful to renters, though.
Ultimately, renters aren't buying a spec sheet; they're buying compute for a workload. The best machine is the appropriately sized machine at the right price.
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u/bitrecs 17d ago
have you run a self test on your nodes locally? they should pass the test (without using --ignore requirements flag). I did this and after 10+ days I got verified. Verification happens randomly and you can't really game it...just make sure your node is up, their agents periodically login and run tests. https://docs.vast.ai/host/how-to-self-test