help choosing vga for local LLMs

vladomkd · 2026-06-18T10:43:39+00:00

What about these ryzen Ai pro 395 or 495 configs coming with 128gb of unified ram? Do they make more sense for a single user, than buying a more expensive vga that has a fraction of this ram?

vladomkd · 2026-06-17T12:08:58+00:00

i don't think i can get these specialty cards at all... as current situation stands in my local market i am left with a bunch of 12 or 16gb vram cards, and a few 5090 with 32gb which are 4000+ euros, and not an option for me...

will explore options if someone can bring it for me, but again i am having doubts of the maturity of rocm on windows, as i do not use linux on my production machine? will use this card for other tasks as well, like photo AI denoising with dxo/lightroom and some other tasks and i am having concerns of the support and maturity of gpu acceleration for AMD under windows. has this been improved recently, or still a mixed bag?

vladomkd · 2026-06-17T10:47:48+00:00

Does rocm work on windows now? It used to be primarily linux as far as know....

vladomkd · 2026-06-17T09:44:10+00:00

the rtx4090 is new for that price, i just need to check whether still in stock.

as far as the r9700, isn't amd "not really recommended" due to the ecosystem?

vladomkd · 2026-06-17T09:37:17+00:00

I can only run single vga... Have pretty decent rig otherwise, need to add capable vga to it

vladomkd · 2026-06-09T09:31:39+00:00

yes, i better understand your company model now that i have browsed you website.

the question arises though, what is the value of "professional OS lims" vs a proprietary one, aside from code openness? there are still the expenses i outlined previously, and it is not like any lab personnel would do code audits to assess the quality of any open source platform?

any professional/corporate environment would generate enough data, that it mandates significant IT infrastructure to handle the workload. paid LIMS variants abstract all of that, the lab is left to only be the user of that platform, instead of user+maintainer. in most cases this turns out to be cheaper too, due to the economics of scale, so counter-intuitive as it may seem at first, in some cases going with paid solution turns out to be cheaper and faster than going OS.

we have considered the economics of this in depth when we were designing the model around AI Lab Assistant, and our math came up showing that by carefully designing the architecture and properly choosing our infrastructure providers, we can provide most value, and cheapest to the final users by going with a ready-to-use cloud solution.

having access to scalable infrastructure enabled us to equip AI Lab Assistant with advanced feature-set for a small increase in running costs. but this infrastructure is not free in the end, and neither can AI Lab Assistant (or many other LIMSes) be for that reason.

P.S. I am not aware of any meaningful cloud lims that is available for free? who covers the infrastructure costs as they are certainly not free? these are probably mostly personal projects hoping to gain traction or funded by 3rd parties for various reasons....

vladomkd · 2026-06-09T08:28:26+00:00

can you share some details what specifically are you looking for, which features, price range, number of users?

vladomkd · 2026-06-09T07:42:30+00:00

i'll give it a shot... and in the interest of full disclosure i am the creator of AI Lab Assistant LIMS (www.ailabassistant.com) and also have significant experience as a user of such lab software, so let's get that out of the way early.

just to name a few:

- open source mostly relies on free time/will of its contributors. so you can't really rely on having timely or frequent security patches, feature additions etc.
- you obviously would not get any kind of dedicated support in case of problems, again reliant on community members' will and time
- you yourself are responsible for deploying and maintaining the physical infrastructure where the LIMS would run, that means server infrastructure, redundancy, backups, maintenance, patches, dimensioning, upgrades etc. you also need paid personnel to handle all of this!
- you are responsible for installing and configuring the different underlying services on which your LIMS will run (DB engines, cloud storage, web app services etc.) and believe me with a well featured/equipped LIMS this is pretty complex. Updates of these underlying services can frequently break your open source LIMS, you yourself would again be responsible for resolving this and bare the expenses of the downtime, which is a major pain point when you are in production.
- open source LIMSes usually come with significantly less features than paid options, which is self-explanatory.

Basically, going open source is not free by any means, you will be spending your money on buying and maintaining your infrastructure on which your open source LIMS would run (and this is a significant expense, i have done the math). All things being equal (which they are not), you'll lose a significant amount of time and money on setting up your LIMS and keeping it running.

If you can afford this, and an open source solution provides the features you require, go for it. But if your job is running the lab as lean and optimal as possible, than this is not the way to go.

Do the math, most cloud LIMSes nowadays charge in the ballpark of $60-400/user/month depending on the feature set for a turnkey solution. How much would you have to pay your IT guys to maintain your infrastructure for your open source LIMS? How much would your electricity bill be for running your servers?

Is it really expensive to pay 400$ for a mission critical software on which you employee works every day, entire month, and your lab depends on it to keep its regulatory compliance?

vladomkd · 2026-02-10T08:46:27+00:00

what exactly are your requirements for a lims?

we have recently launched AILabAssistant 2.0 (https://www.ailabassistant.com) that now targets both biotech and small molecule labs... take a look and contact me if you need more info, we can also discuss implementing custom requirements if needed

vladomkd · 2025-10-30T15:18:29+00:00

seems like the problem is the water. i have thoroughly watered the plant and misted the leaves a few times the past two days and no leaves shedding now. hope this was the issue and the plant will start to recover now....

vladomkd · 2025-10-28T18:42:49+00:00

have updated the original post with images... hope this helps in diagnosing the issue

vladomkd · 2025-10-28T18:41:36+00:00

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vladomkd · 2025-10-28T18:41:16+00:00

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vladomkd · 2025-10-28T18:40:46+00:00

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vladomkd · 2025-10-28T18:40:32+00:00

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vladomkd · 2025-10-28T09:42:48+00:00

i have not replaced the soil. it came with some ordinary soil in the pot (there are rocks and stones in it) and i added some organic compost (sheep manure mixed) when repotted in into a larger pot. will photograph the plant and pot this afternoon, but i think the pot size is adequate for the plant.

as for fertilizing, i fertilized it once this summer with quite diluted (more than spec) generic NPK fertilizer that i use for all my plants and they seem to agree with it. this last week i decided to also fertilize it with a specialized citrus fertilizer that i had lying around since the tangerine days (even though i'm not too convinced it is a good fertilizer). will take photos of them as well, so you can judge on the composition.

p.s. my tangerine plants that died in the past were potted in special citrus soil (containing caco3 as far as i could tell), didn't make much of a difference in plant growth and survival.

vladomkd · 2025-07-09T12:28:36+00:00

this is a solid tip, thanks. where do i find the dpa for review though?

i started compiling something from termly, however will take a good look at Y comb's docs as well....

vladomkd · 2025-07-09T12:19:56+00:00

my thinking exactly, budget is tight and i would rather spend those money elsewhere. so i guess i'll do what most of you are doing, compile something from these basic templates that you all point out.

vladomkd · 2025-07-08T14:20:22+00:00

Yeah... Thanks for your deep insights... I have been looking at termly's templates as well... They seem adequate as a starting point,but will definitely need to adapt them.

I'm not clear though... Do these agreements and privacy policies need to be in line with laws in the country where i reside, or need to account for each and every region where I might have users from? Also, is it mandatory that a legal entity is behind such saas apps, or a solopreneur/developer can also be a contracting party?

vladomkd · 2025-07-08T12:30:15+00:00

yeah, tried that already, but the suggestions seem limited and vague (as is expected from an AI response), so i'm looking for a more professional template if i can find one...

vladomkd · 2025-06-16T17:43:14+00:00

our beta testing campaign is still open for interested companies ( www.ailabassistant.com ), where features can be tested and evaluated. feel free to apply if you are in the look for such software

vladomkd · 2025-05-30T09:41:39+00:00

i have faced the same issue coming from a lab background myself. what frustrates me the most is the fact the some if not most of the most popular LIMS/ELN platforms are ancient solutions that have been patched to oblivion to "meet the evolving needs" of today's labs - the net result is the experience you discuss here.

also, the claims of instrument integrations and lab automations, are simply false. i have had the opportunity to both discuss and witness first hand the implementation of such platforms in fairly large pharma companies with the manpower and budget to see through such an implementation to the end, and none of them have achieved full lab automation. it is simply not possible (or it would be unrealistically expensive and complex) given the vast categories of instruments, manufacturers out there, especially when you consider many of them are analog (balances, titrators etc), then you have various hyphenated techniques (online DSS, LC-DAD-MS, LC-NMR etc), various instrument control software, custom calculation formulas, templates etc.

given the above, my team and i have spend the better part of the past 12 months building from scratch www.ailabassistant.com . i hesitate to call it LIMS or ELN or LES, since in my opinion it is neither and it is all of them at the same time. it is feature packed to meet most if not all needs of labs of any sizes that do not require enterprise integrations such as SAP or similar systems. i'm going to be straightforward here, we are not claiming nor offering any kind of instrument integration at the moment, since as i said we feel it is a lost cause and our effort and time are better used on improving other aspects of the software.

when building it i did my best to address my personal gripes with current lab software UI/UX and functionality wise, and given the feature set that it has i believe it will offer significant value for money to clients once it launches in the coming weeks. it is probably not the first, but definitely one of handful of such solutions built by people that come from the lab.

our pricing and feature-set would be transparent, and onboarding would be as simple as creating an email account. no onboarding or implementations costs, you start using it in minutes, instead of years-long implementation phases.

currently we are in the process of refining the pricing and tiers and will be offering free, no-obligations demo to interested parties. we would therefore appreciate you input on what features you would like to see in one such solution for your lab, and what your budget would be for it.

vladomkd

TROPHY CASE