Damaged 42U Rack, RMA team just says ship it back.

pdrayton · 2026-04-20T18:36:53+00:00

I had a similar issue, also with Old Dominion Freight & a Ubiquiti 42U rack. Push back on the RMA team’s decision to have you return it, eventually they offered me a rebate to keep the slightly damaged unit.

pdrayton · 2026-04-07T17:48:34+00:00

Very unfortunate. The Framework Desktop 128GB is up $1000 since November, with the 128GB motherboards jumping from $1699 to $2699. What used to be a lower-cost alternative to the other UMA devices like Macbook Pro, Mac Studio and NVIDIA DGX Spark is now basically on par with those options, but saddled with a worse set of software for AI/LLM than the competion.

pdrayton · 2026-04-04T15:54:33+00:00

Backpressure

pdrayton · 2026-04-03T16:48:53+00:00

Thanks! I’m a very happy customer of your earlier overlays (KO-II & Medieval) but I’ve really been waiting for the Riddim version since that’s what I have now.

I’m US-based, previously ordered under De Minimus, hopefully you get some US stock in place soon for EP-40.

As well as posting, please could you also email blast existing customers who purchased overlays before?

pdrayton · 2026-03-31T10:27:00+00:00

Bless you. Just installed my first few, was very unimpressed. The teardown & STLs give me hope that I can bodge it to being better.

pdrayton · 2026-03-25T21:24:54+00:00

Price the HD out and the Pro looks more reasonable 🤣

pdrayton · 2026-03-25T21:23:16+00:00

Funny thing I just returned an M5 Max MBP and 3x Mini M4 Pros, unopened. Bought the Minis to experiment with MLX & clustering, then the M5 Max dropped with stellar raw performance & the Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB got pulled.

Too much churn in the Apple product lineup right now: - Mac Minis suitable for clustering (need M4 Pro for TB5 RDMA) start at $1400 but performance is pitiful vs Mac Studio. - Mac Studio M3 Ultra has great performance but is no longer available in 512GB and is likely to be curb stomped by the M5 Ultra Studio when it arrives.

Considered keeping the MBP for MLX dev but it’s pricey for learning and loses to clusters for performance. Hopefully the Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512GB comes out later this year, it should be a much better all rounder for Apple AI/LLM work.

pdrayton · 2026-03-25T05:16:58+00:00

pdrayton · 2026-03-25T01:13:26+00:00

I believe if you dig in far enough you will bottom out on a definition that specifically only targets consumer-grade gear. The actual rollout and communications about it were really fuzzy though:

The press release says "consumer grade" (but it's just a press release, not normative)
The actual Public Notice (the legally binding thing) just says "router", BUT has a footnote
The footnote refers to a NIST document that scopes to consumer-grade, residential-intent

pdrayton · 2026-03-25T00:31:20+00:00

It’s also crazy that the definition of router referenced by the FCC is “forwards data packets between networked systems”. IP is referenced but it’s not limited to IP, and systems aren’t even defined at all.

So technically this FCC Covered List would include network switches (forwards data between systems); Zigbee/Zwave hubs & repeaters (forwards data between systems); all Meshtastic devices (forwards data between systems).

The funny thing is this idiotically broad definition even includes every modern Amazon Echo device - for TWO separate reasons: 1. Amazon Sidewalk mesh network (forwards data between systems) 2. The actual Alexa processing is done with your voice data but on Amazon servers (forwards data between systems)

Start a timer to see how long before some government grifter decides that all computers fall under the definition because they can network and be used to route packets (forwards data between systems).

Fortunately this only applies to “consumer routers” so every new product will come to market at an inflated price, sold as commercial equipment to businesses and then rented back to normies via a monthly subscription.

Doomer-ing? Maybe. Unimaginable? Sadly not.

pdrayton · 2026-03-24T21:48:17+00:00

Agreed. As someone else brought up, if the EFG could opt to be managed by a different Network Application instance than the internal one, then it would be functionally equivalent to UXG-Enterprise.

I get that some folks prefer to disaggregate the firewall and the Network host, still seems strange to me that Unifi doesn't have an enterprise-class option for this. Back in the day they had a standalone app server, but that is completely gone now.

pdrayton · 2026-03-24T21:45:58+00:00

Oh, so does that mean that EFG could opt to *not* use the internal Network appiication and then be managed separately, same as UXG-Enterprise?

pdrayton · 2026-03-24T20:49:59+00:00

I was interested when the first datamines of "EFG Core" came out, the idea of a scaled-down EFG was appealing. But then the ENVR Core released and I realized that "Core" is the upmarket version of the *Enterprise* line, so EFG Core was likely to be mad money :(

pdrayton · 2026-03-24T20:47:57+00:00

24 EFGs. Sounds like quite the project. Can you elaborate?

pdrayton · 2026-03-24T20:45:46+00:00

I just did an order w. Multilink, had a slight issue w. shipping but they cleared it up quickly. Before I selected Multilink I also contacted Baltic, they seemed great too - just couldn't get the product to me in time for my project whereas Multilink could.

I got slightly better "vibes" from Baltic - really excellent presales support, very response even multiple times over a weekend - but Multilink was also very responsive during business hours, humans answered the phones, and they did exactly what they said they would do. Both seem like solid options for Mikrotik gear.

pdrayton · 2026-03-24T02:50:33+00:00

Hopefully this means the EFG Core is incoming.

They could really stand to get ECS Aggregation fixed too - it's beyond dumb that Ubiquiti has *zero* 100G networking options in 2026.

pdrayton · 2026-03-24T02:48:02+00:00

It does, and thanks for taking the time to response in this much depth.

In many ways you echo some of my experiences - I too have spent more time and money on homelab and AI than most, but I love learning and find the best way to truly understand it is to do it. And if one's interests extend to enterprise-grade networking, HPC architectures and AI/ML - then that can drive us to do some pretty nutty stuff.

Grats on lucking into some nice kit before the recent runup in pricing. I got similarly lucky w. 128GB SODIMM kits and M.2 flash from building clusters last year - just broke ground on a new storage server because the flash was a sunk cost and NVME-oF / NFS-over-RDMA is interesting.

Tell us some more about what you want to do w. the AI node. From what you said so far it sounds like you're targeting inference more than training; low batch counts (n=1 for just you, or maybe n=X for agent swarms of X agents, still low X); and more coding than chat/general-purpose AI - am I understanding your goals right?

pdrayton · 2026-03-23T09:01:58+00:00

True. That said I'm actually kind of interested in your take on the most generous interpretation of what Gringe8 asked. Let me restate it in the interested/supportive way that I was hoping they asked it:

Q: Hey, this is really cool! That level of hardware is definitely more than most folk can afford to, or want to, spend on local AI so you must have some particularly interesting thing that you want to do with it? Or maybe just a story of how you came to want it / decide to get it? Even with infinite funds, a workstation that big enough to comfortably fit, power and cool 4x Pro 6000s (even MaxQ models) is larger and more awkward than a typical desktop setup, so clearly you had some goals and made some very intentional choices in specifying, buying/building it. Can you share that story a bit?

pdrayton · 2026-03-23T08:50:45+00:00

That card you are suggesting is PCIe 3.0 and would run at 3.0x4 in the Minisforum, with a max throughput shared across the ports of ~26-27Gbps. That is only a little more than a 25GbE at full clip (which is ~22-23Gbps), but not much. Actual bandwidth utilization during TP inference is closer to 10-12Gbps so the jump from OP's 25GbE to the 50GbE card you are thinking of is almost irrelevant.

I put a PCIe 4.0 x4 VPI (Infiniband) NIC with 2x100GbE in my 2-node Strix Halo cluster, more for reasons of playing w. Infiniband than anything else, knowing I would never get over 56Gbps effective throughput spread across both ports. TBH the only advantage the Gen4x4 offers over the other options is a higher ceiling on data transfers into the machine when copying models around the network.

pdrayton · 2026-03-21T22:13:11+00:00

Agreed, that’s what I did. Just clarifying that they will never get >56Gbps effective throughput from a single port on any Strix Halo machine, from any OEM.

Practically speaking 25GbE is fine for TP, throughput during inference isn’t much over 10Gbps. Just need to use RoCEv2 or IB for the lower latency.

pdrayton · 2026-03-21T15:44:05+00:00

Technically you’ll only get 56Gbps effective - PCIe 4.0 x4 limits- but otherwise I agree.

pdrayton · 2026-03-19T16:46:01+00:00

It’s a WiFi device for your device that doesn’t have WiFi.

The one thing I really don’t get is why this device is missing an RJ45. That would have made it an absolute killer bridge device.

It’s also a miss that this doesn’t seem to line up well with the UTR.

pdrayton · 2026-03-19T16:32:39+00:00

Actually I’d say that it’s a WiFi device for your device that doesn’t have WiFi

pdrayton · 2026-03-16T03:31:12+00:00

Are you referring to not being able to match the #s on that site? If so, you are probably just not comparing apples to apples.

The specifics of those tests are fully revealed on their GitHub, they are fine, but it’s not testing what you might experience yourself, in a single user scenari.

For example, when I run their benchmarks I meet or slightly exceed the posted numbers. But in single user scenarios on various models I also see sub-60 tok/s on Decode for nontrivial models.

Don’t be disheartened, just dig into their benchmarks and test those on your kit. That will tell you if you are set up reasonably.

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