The $1700 great Deep Learning box: Assembly, setup and benchmarks

After years of using a thin client in the form of increasingly thinner MacBooks, I had gotten used to it. So when I got into Deep Learning (DL), I went straight for the brand new at the time Amazon P2 cloud servers. No upfront cost, the ability to train many models simultaneously and the general coolness of having a machine learning model out there slowly teaching itself. However, as time passed, the AWS bills steadily grew larger, even as I switched to 10x cheaper Spot instances. Also, I didn't find myself training more than one model at a time.