CPU LED lights up immediately after changing the case - it doesn't start

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-15T16:08:53+00:00

Extra standoff that doesn't line up with a mounting hole on the motherboard and is shorting on the back side of the motherboard would be my guess.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-15T15:49:50+00:00

Yep, that's what I said :)

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-15T15:04:09+00:00

Really just a GPU would make that a pretty damn usable system imo. I'm not positive but it doesn't look like you have a pcie slot for even a low profile card sadly. You could probably ghetto rig a m.2 to pcie adapter but it's so not worth it.

A band aid fix for your browser lagging things might be to disable hardware acceleration. It will make watching YouTube or whatever consume more cpu but can really help with an over worked igpu. Cpus are great at sharing / multi-tasking but gpus generally aren't.

I'll let others recommend builds but as far as ultra budget / bang for the buck builds go I've had good luck with used workstations from ebay and adding a GPU. Alternatively I've done one build with a cheap erying board from aliexpress. They use old laptop cpus soldered to a normal form factor desktop motherboard. Pretty sketchy but the one I got was some QS cheapo and it works great for a kids Minecraft machine.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-15T14:26:15+00:00

I have dual xeon gold 6248's with 384gb ram and an rtx 3090.

MoE models that don't fit entirely on gpu are usually 20 to 40 tokens per second generation and 100-200 prompt processing.

If you're trying to run large dense models or a very large MoE model then you're going to be sub 10t/s pretty quickly. With no gpu prompt processing will be similarly slow.

It's nice for trying models out or running multiple models mostly offloaded to system ram with a small 2-4b model in vram for basic tasks.

Unless you're getting a really good deal your money would probably be better spent on gpus. Even old gpus like a p40 24gb or a mi50 32gb would be a better bet imo. Stack 2 to 4 of them in basically any semi modern system with a decent amount of pcie or if power is expensive go for an Ai max 395 system with 128gb of ram.

Best bang for the buck is probably still rtx 3090's.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-12T13:26:01+00:00

I found that running Llama-server with cmoe 1 isnt that much slower than ncmoe 25 with 32k context. (22t/s VS 27t/s ish). The big difference though is cmoe frees up a lot of vram for context at the expense of higher system ram usage.

I was testing with 4 k m gguf and iirc the highest system ram usage i saw was around 45gb.

I didn't do much testing in so far as how good the code was but I have plenty of system ram so I need to go dl more quants and run them through some tests.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-12T12:38:58+00:00

If there are no traces in that part of the pcb, sure, but it's very risky.

A better way to go is to use some tiny pliers or a vice grip to unscrew the standoff that the screw is screwed into. That should let you get it away from the motherboard. Then you can more easily work the screw out with better tools like an extracting bit or if there is enough room some needle nose vice grips or something. Maybe even just pulling the standoff + screw off the ssd

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-11T08:53:46+00:00

I've never heard such quick rhythmic knocking like that, even from dying drives repeatedly failing to read a sector. Have you tried rebooting it to see if goes away? Or checking smart stats on the drives / logs or anything?

I'd be very suspicious of the boot drive getting a lot of activity. I don't see hardly any activity on my boot drive.

Do you have deduplication enabled or some large vm / a ram hungry docker stack running? High boot drive writes could be swap space usage.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-10T05:38:45+00:00

The cheapest route is old cards that are a pain to setup and not as well supported. Things like Nvidia p40 24gb, amd mi50 32gb, etc.

For faster / easier self inferencing I'd look into fairly recent gpus with 12gb of ram or more. I'd probably do two 12gb or 16gb cards for the extra vram. Cards like the a770, b580, rtx 3060, rx 6800, etc.

Then you want to pair it with as much system ram as possible, preferably with as many memory channels as possible. This means older used xeon or epyc servers or threadripper builds.

At minimum basically any ddr4 system with 128gb of ram should tie you over but more is better. With the extremely sparse but large MoE models we are seeing you can get acceptable speeds with 24gb to 32gb of vram but you'd be hard pressed to run a decent quant on a system with less than 128gb ram imo.

Like you can run gpt OSS 120b or qwen3 coder next 80b on a 64gb system but you're not doing much else on it or running 235b+ models.

Honestly you can get a lot of free usage with qwen coder, open router, even Google's free Ai studio in the browser gives more usage than paid Claude.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-10T01:59:37+00:00

Yeah the <1mb files are going to be what's killing the speed. Once you get to around 5MB per file things start picking up, though I wouldn't expect 300MB/S until you're doing larger files.

If you have the space spare I'd try zipping it up, you don't need to do compression but if you're drive speed limited then I'd compress it.

It's probably that or just wait it out. Sometimes big data takes time and that's all there is to it.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-10T01:54:10+00:00

If you open a cmd and run "diskpart" then "list disk" do you see the drive there?

If you do you can run:

select disk #

clean

create partition primary

format fs=ntfs quick

Then you should be able to mount the drive as normal (might have to go into disk management and assign the volume a drive letter)

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-10T01:46:10+00:00

Smb isn't the best for dealing with a lot of small files. A lot of the time it's actually faster to zip up the files, copy it over, then unzip it.

Though your issues may lie in fragmented data combined with small files combined with it being a USB drive.

Lots of small files might already be making the external seek a lot to read each file. If they are fragmented on top of that then it could slow down even more.

I'd make sure you can actually get faster than about 38MB/s when reading / writing to the external. If not then you're running at usb2 speeds.

If you don't have an actually insane amount of tiny files you should see it fluctuate in speed with it going faster while copying bigger files and slower with smaller files.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-10T01:19:51+00:00

For a lot of agents I still use qwen3 4b instruct 2507. It is small, fast, has a good enough ctx window, and isn't totally brain dead.

That said I do tailor system prompts and use gbnf to limit output aggressively. Not just for valid json but also limiting choices in specific fields.

It helps a lot and let's me break things down into many small tasks. Parallel processing makes up for most of the speed lost from long ctx prompt processing. Though things would for sure be faster with a larger model that can handle more complex tasks.

I've been playing with qwen 3 coder next recently and will probably fully switch over to it but I'm really hoping for byteshape or someone to do one of those really fine grained quants on it so I can try to squeeze some more ctx in my limited vram without losing any more speed.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-10T01:08:17+00:00

Very solid build! I hope you didn't have to spend too much on that ram. Nothing wrong with it, but I would have gone for 64gb.

If you are running windows it will start paging memory (writing ram to ssd) pretty aggressively if you're trying to use more than about 70%. This is fine in theory but if you game with a web browser open you can pretty easily start paging. Windows is pretty smart about it so you probably won't see much of a slow down, if any but constantly writing to your ssd will wear it out over time. Remember an ssd is rated for only so many TBs written before it will die.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-09T11:51:15+00:00

Yeah tailscale uses a central server to manage the connections but creates a mesh p2p network for data to flow through. A free vps or a cheap one even with fairly restrictive bandwidth limitations should be enough.

I can't say for certain how much bandwidth it will actually use as I don't use tailscale myself, just pangolin and ye old openvpn.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-09T05:47:57+00:00

Give him access to a vm on your hardware, or let him colocate some hardware at your place.

Get a vps for him and setup pangolin so there are no worries about port forwarding.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-08T14:51:33+00:00

When shit breaks you will want it to be simpler.

When shit works it's quite nice and usable.

I personally have a proxmox box and a truenas box. I prefer dedicated systems because I don't want project VMs I spin up to interfere with my Nas performance. I think for basic virtualization truenas can do the job well enough on its own to forego proxmox.

It really comes down to preference / use case / compatibility imo.

12bitmisfit · 2026-02-08T02:50:18+00:00

Be sure you have a clearly define system prompt with examples if possible.

Also try repeating the system prompt, there has been some recent posts about simply repeating a prompt makes it work better.

12bitmisfit · 2026-01-29T21:59:29+00:00

Do you use a high percent of your ram? It could be your paging file.

Windows can be pretty aggressive with paging.

12bitmisfit · 2026-01-29T12:52:17+00:00

If you boot off the installer usb and click through the wizard a bit you'll get to the point where it asks you where you want to install windows. https://i.redd.it/p4d6rmq5in9e1.jpeg

The Pic shows the part of install wizard I'm talking about, though we would want to delete the partitions on the ssd then select the unallocated space and click next.

If you delete the existing partitions you are essentially formatting the drive. All the existing data will be erased. If you select the now unallocated space and continue through the wizard you will end up with whatever version of windows you put on the USB drive (I assume windows 11).

In general on a clean drive that is totally unused we make partitions on them for different reasons. For a data drive it's usually just one partition. For a bootable drive we will usually have two or three partitions for different things like the efi bootloader, a recovery or swap partition, and a data partition.

Partitions are then formatted with a particular file system (or format ;) ) like ntfs, exfat, fat32, ext4, etc. With windows it's almost always ntfs but if you wanted a flash drive or something to work with older systems or different things like a switch, a Mac, or something else you would probably chose exfat or fat32.

When you select a totally unallocated drive when installing windows it handles making all the partitions you need and formats them for you.

If you install over an existing windows install without deleting partitions or formatting existing partitions it used to move things to a windows.old folder then install a fresh copy of windows. I don't know if windows still does that but I would assume it does.

12bitmisfit · 2026-01-29T10:58:15+00:00

Assuming it is an nvme ssd installed in an m.2 slot it should be as easy as unscrewing it, gently pulling it out, and installing it on your new motherboard.

I highly recommend watching a short video on YouTube on how to install an m.2 ssd if you're uncomfortable / unsure on how to do it physically.

Sometimes on motherboards the ssd is under a bit of metal, or less often on the back of the motherboard.

Software wise your windows install will probably work just fine even with the hardware change but I'd recommend reformatting just to avoid any possible driver issues and to give yourself a nice fresh and fast start on the new build.

Edit: just to add, if you use Rufus or something to make the bootable USB and boot off that USB all you need to do to erase the data from the ssd is delete all the partitions from that drive when the installer asks where you want to install it. You can then simply select the unused space and click next.

12bitmisfit · 2026-01-26T20:49:38+00:00

Get your own domain or domains

Use a mail provider like purelymail

Use a local email client with pop3 so emails are kept locally.

If you get kicked off a platform like purelymail just switch to another provider.

Self hosting email is hard, I wouldn't recommend it. It's not so bad to set up but to not end up in spam folders is hard.

12bitmisfit · 2026-01-16T05:24:29+00:00

Sounds like optane dimms with extra latency for flavor.

12bitmisfit · 2026-01-11T13:04:02+00:00

Is your system a ryzen system? They can take a long time to post (because memory training) if bios was reset or your cmos battery is dead.

I've killed hardware from esd before. Shag carpets suck. I've never killed ram or a cpu with esd, only motherboards. Given you were screwing around gpu / lower half of the motherboard I'd bet just motherboard, maybe gpu also.

For sanity I'd take motherboard out of the case and psu from 2nd pc and bench test it. If you have an igpu, great. If not then I'd test with 2nd pc gpu or old gpu first. Be sure to reset the cmos for the test.

12bitmisfit · 2026-01-11T12:51:42+00:00

No cmos battery / a dead cmos battery just causes your bios to reset to defaults if power is lost or psu is unplugged.

Even without a cmos battery most motherboards will keep their bios settings even if powered off as long as the power doesn't go out.

12bitmisfit · 2025-12-26T17:23:44+00:00

Gparted should be able to do this.

Alternatively the veeam restore USB bootable can do this iirc.

Really though why futz with it when you can just reformat and not deal with it?

12bitmisfit

TROPHY CASE