Just a guy shilling for gun ownership, tech privacy, and trans rights.

I’m open for chats on mastodon https://hachyderm.io/

my blog: thinkstoomuch.net

My email: nags@thinkstoomuch.net

Always looking for penpals!

  • 8 Posts
  • 42 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 21st, 2023

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  • It was really simple to do in Proxmox.

    You will find no name brand HBAs in IT mode on eBay for half the price of Intel, Supermicro, Dell, Etc branded ones. Do not buy the no names. I spent a week flashing and reflashing some cheap one, cycling through cables, etc. Nothing.

    My supermicro branded one worked absolutely no issue. And I think it was like $40

    It probably took a total of 30 minutes to pass it through and build the VM and everything. It took a couple days to rebuild my data from my previous truenas server but I had 10 TB of data on 4 drives.

    The only issues I’ve had have been my own reading comprehension in setting up truenas accounts.







  • From what I understand its not as fast as a consumer Nvdia card but but close.

    And you can have much more “Vram” because they do unified memory. I think the max is 75% of total system memory goes to the GPU. So a top spec Mac mini M4 Pro with 48GB of Ram would have 32gb dedicated to GPU/NPU tasks for $2000

    Compare that to JUST a 5090 32GB for $2000 MSRP and its pretty compelling.

    $200 and its the 64GB model with 2x 4090’s amounts of Vram.

    Its certainly better than the AMD AI experience and its the best price for getting into AI stuff so says nerds with more money and experience than me.



  • The Lenovo Thinkcentre M715q were $400 total after upgrades. I fortunately had 3 32 GB kits of ram from my work’s e-waste bin but if I had to add those it would probably be $550 ish The rack was $120 from 52pi I bought 2 extra 10in shelves for $25 each the Pi cluster rack was also $50 (shit I thought it was $20. Not worth) Patch Panel was $20 There’s a UPS that was $80 And the switch was $80

    So in total I spent $800 on this set up

    To fully replicate from scratch you would need to spend $160 on raspberry pis and probably $20 on cables

    So $1000 theoratically



  • Ollama and all that runs on it its just the firewall rules and opening it up to my network that’s the issue.

    I cannot get ufw, iptables, or anything like that running on it. So I usually just ssh into the PC and do a CLI only interaction. Which is mostly fine.

    I want to use OpenWebUI so I can feed it notes and books as context, but I need the API which isn’t open on my network.


  • With a RTX 3060 12gb, I have been perfectly happy with the quality and speed of the responses. It’s much slower than my 5060ti which I think is the sweet spot for text based LLM tasks. A larger context window provided by more vram or a web based AI is cool and useful, but I haven’t found the need to do that yet in my use case.

    As you may have guessed, I can’t fit a 3060 in this rack. That’s in a different server that houses my NAS. I have done AI on my 2018 Epyc server CPU and its just not usable. Even with 109gb of ram, not usable. Even clustered, I wouldn’t try running anything on these machines. They are for docker containers and minecraft servers. Jeff Geerling probably has a video on trying to run an AI on a bunch of Raspberry Pis. I just saw his video using Ryzen AI Strix boards and that was ass compared to my 3060.

    But to my use case, I am just asking AI to generate simple scripts based on manuals I feed it or some sort of writing task. I either get it to take my notes on a topic and make an outline that makes sense and I fill it in or I feed it finished writings and ask for grammatical or tone fixes. Thats fucking it and it boggles my mind that anyone is doing anything more intensive then that. I am not training anything and 12gb VRAM is plenty if I wanna feed like 10-100 pages of context. Would it be better with a 4090? Probably, but for my uses I haven’t noticed a difference in quality between my local LLM and the web based stuff.





  • Not really a lot of thought went into rack choice. I wanted something smaller and more powerful than my several optiplexs I had.

    I also decided I didn’t want storage to happen here anymore because I am stupid and only knew how to pass through disks for Truenas. So I had 4 truenas servers on my network and I hated it.

    This was just what I wanted at a price I was good with at Like $120. There’s a 3D printable version but I wasn’t interested in that. I do want to 3D print racks and I want to make my own custom ones for the Pis to save space.

    But this set up is way cheaper if you have a printer and some patience.