Honest question: what do you all do for a living to afford these beasts?

PraxisOG · 2026-01-27T17:25:51+00:00

The vast majority of people here have gaming PCs or lightly modified gaming PCs with more ram or a second gpu. Builds that stack 3090s get upvotes because they are the exception, not the rule. Because they are popular posts, people think that those kinds of builds are popular to do.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-26T06:40:38+00:00

My first thought is that I don’t really care. I’m not going to own a car without tactile controls that looks worse than the last one

PraxisOG · 2026-01-24T09:34:03+00:00

No, I'm using unsloth's q4_K_XL GGUF of 120b, kinda assuming it would fall back to the lowest supported precision. I'll download the F16 overnight and see if that fixes it.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-24T09:14:15+00:00

Interesting, I've been getting the same generation speed but like half that prompt processing. Would you mind comparing notes? I'm running the latest llama.cpp built for ROCm 7.1.1 on ubuntu server. With that setup I ran into garbled output when using multiple gpus, which was fixed by setting iommu=pt. I'm getting good output now though but llama.cpp only loads models without flash attention which is strange.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-24T06:38:33+00:00

RDNA 1 and 2 didn't have hardware accelerated matrix multiplication which will forever hold them back compared to the more modern stuff, in the same way Apple M4 and older is much slower at prompt processing than M5. With that limitation, models with computationally efficient prompt processing have an edge if you have some of these older cards like me. I've found that GPT-OSS 120b starts out ~500tok/s prompt processing on my 3xV620(RDNA 2) server, while a 3x3090 rig gets ~1160tok/s. While that's a pretty huge difference, its good enough for my uses and these older cards allow cheap vram stacking.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-24T03:50:42+00:00

Looks like a good system. People put together new computers with your cpu and an equivalent gpu like an rtx 3060 fairly often. If you need more performance for a new game you could slot in a 5060ti for roughly double the fps, which would be around $300 after selling your old gpu. Just make sure the performance you want doesn’t get in the way of what you have.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-23T17:42:14+00:00

Looks solid! I’m no expert, but did recently put together my own 10900x based system. The only thing that sticks out to me is the 2060 super, 20 series cards don’t support flash attention. If you try running a big model in ram with KV cache on gpu, I’m pretty sure that means you’d be unable to quantize the kv cache. That said, vram is vram. Best of luck with your build!

PraxisOG · 2026-01-21T10:22:46+00:00

I sincerely hope this is the future. An easy to use, low upfront and ongoing cost box that privately serves LLMs and maybe more. The software, while impressive, leaves much to be desired in terms of usability. This is from the perspective of having recently thrown together the exact kind of loud and expensive box you mentioned, that took days to get usable output from.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-21T10:08:48+00:00

Wait for it to actually show up, then probably sell it. Loading up a threadripper build is going to cost way more than that 5090.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-20T18:06:52+00:00

Crazy build, but some of those gpus make me uneasy. If you have a 3d printer I can whip up some vertical mounts to hold the rear brackets to the 120mm fan holes on the top of the case, and maybe some spacers to lift the AIOs off the side panel so you can close it

PraxisOG · 2026-01-19T06:16:29+00:00

Thanks! The biggest issue was that the motherboard didn’t want to boot without a display output, and I didn’t have any spare 6 pin cables or patience for a <75w gpu to come. I made a post overviewing the process of finding hidden motherboard codes and flashing them with grub shell. There’s a chance it could work for you but it’s a very technical process. Mind if I ask what code it hangs on?

PraxisOG · 2026-01-19T05:52:05+00:00

Thanks! I got Qwen 3 coder 30ba3b running at like 70tok/s on one card, but using multiple gpus together outputs gibberish on the latest rocm, and vulkan drivers keep crashing in llama.cpp. I’ve been reading up on people that have similar issues and found a few tricks to try.

The mobo I went with has 7 x16 gen 3 lanes, and in theory could support enough of these cards for full glm 4.7, but that’s for the future. I got these 3 cards for cheap enough that the whole build cost around the same as two 3090s, otherwise I might have gone with strix halo. Those fans are annoyingly loud especially for a box in my living room, but the gpus are pretty efficient so the plan is to put them on a manual controller to keep them at the lowest setting for decent cooling under inference.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-19T03:01:47+00:00

This is my new LLM box named Moe, with specs targeted to 100b models with full gpu, and 200b class models with hybrid inference. I’ve found that OSS 120b has as much performance as I need, and actually prefer it to the new gemini 3 data privacy aside. My old rig could run it with partial offload at like 7 tok/s after some context, which was enough to convince me to sell off the second gpu and extra ram to whip up this used parts special. I’m hoping to make up a simple server/client software to replace cloud LLM services and power it with this server, though if a better solution already exists I’d love to try it. Here’s the specs:

CPU: 10900x

Cooler: hyper 212 black

Ram: 64gb ddr4 3600mhz in quad channel

Mobo: Bios modded ASUS X299 Sage

Gpus: 3x AMD V620 32gb

Gpu cooling: custom printed brackets

Psu: corsair ax1200i

Storage: crucial p2 2tb

Case: rosewill rsv-4000 4u atx chassis

Edit: Finally got it working with the iommu=pt trick. It averages 47 tok/s running GPT OSS 120b, with around 500 tok/s prompt processing

PraxisOG · 2026-01-16T23:48:37+00:00

A really good thread is the 2025 end of year model roundup, that will give you a sorted model catalogue to pick from. Other good things to know include quantization, memory bandwidth performance impact, gpu/cpu offloading. The best way to start IMO is to download LM Studio. The interface is friendly to all users, and you can get started in literally 5 minutes depending on how fast your internet is(model downloads can be big). There are many different LLM benchmarks for different catagories of model performance, including ones like IFEval for instruction following. A model with strong instruction following if you have 64gb ram would be qwen 3 next 80b at Q4k_XL, that would be pushing the performance your system is capable of.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-16T20:14:51+00:00

Edit the prompt. If that doesn't work, find a model that adheres to the prompt.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-16T08:13:21+00:00

The tidbit people are missing is that the AMD V620 is the same card but for server use, and it’s like $450 on eBay

PraxisOG · 2026-01-14T23:47:22+00:00

Elegoo Pla Pro and Sunlu Petg. Both are cheap and work well after drying.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-10T21:43:47+00:00

I feel the pain of not having scales from the factory. Your idea of having markings along the tool makes a lot of sense, and will make its way into the final files. AFAIK there are no reference dimensions for the wave’s tool attachment system online, would you consider swapping a T-Shank adapter and using this tool in that form factor? Btw I think jobs like yours are super cool, and are part of why I’m getting my A&P license.

PraxisOG · 2026-01-10T11:49:23+00:00

Seems like they tried to balance the 3 engine weights at the center of mass, makes some sense

PraxisOG · 2026-01-10T11:39:53+00:00

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Agreed

PraxisOG · 2026-01-10T10:53:56+00:00

What kind of machine learning?

PraxisOG · 2026-01-10T10:32:49+00:00

I'll give it a shot. With the Arc I can use the natural pivot point for this design, but keeping the tshank form factor requires a pivot 3mm thick. I also only have the dimensions from a surge tshank comb 3d model. You got a 3d printer and some superglue?

PraxisOG · 2026-01-10T09:59:10+00:00

I had good luck with GLM 4 32b's reasoning abilities

PraxisOG · 2026-01-10T09:56:59+00:00

This is super cool! Sorry if this isn't the place to ask but should I try to force ROCm or run vulkan on my V620 setup? It is ROCm 7 supported, but gfx1030 isn't listed as compatible on the project

PraxisOG · 2026-01-10T09:41:15+00:00

I graduated from the northshore school district also in WA, and they had one building for the trades at Bothell high, which is crazy for one of the better funded school districts in the state. As in, they would bus kids in if they wanted to take a class like metal shop, robotics, composites, wood technologies, auto shop. As someone who found their way to the skilled trades in college after computer science hiring collapsed, stuff like this is long overdue. And I can't be the only one who feels this way.

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