My rack is finished for now (because I’m out of money).
Last time I posted I had some jank cables going through the rack and now we’re using patch panels with color coordinated cables!
But as is tradition, I’m thinking about upgrades and I’m looking at that 1U filler panel. A mini PC with a 5060ti 16gb or maybe a 5070 12gb would be pretty sick to move my AI slop generating into my tiny rack.
I’m also thinking about the PI cluster at the top. Currently that’s running a Kubernetes cluster that I’m trying to learn on. They’re all PI4 4GB, so I was going to start replacing them with PI5 8/16GB. Would those be better price/performance for mostly coding tasks? Or maybe a discord bot for shitposting.
Thoughts? MiniPC recs? Wanna bully me for using AI? Please do!
Eh, actually that’s not what I had in mind:
Discrete desktop graphics idle hot. I think my 3090 uses at least 40W doing literally nothing.
It’s always better to run big dies slower than small dies at high clockspeeds. In other words, if you underclocked a big desktop GPU to 1/2 its peak clockspeed, it would use less than a fourth of the energy and run basically inaudible… and still be faster than the iGPU. So why keep a big iGPU around?
My use case was multitasking and compute stuff. EG game/use the discrete GPU while your IGP churns away running something. Or combine them in some workloads.
Even the 395 by itself doesn’t make a ton of sense for an HTPC because AMD slaps so much CPU on it. It’s way too expensive and makes it power thirsty. A single CCD (8 cores instead of 16) + the full integrated GPU would be perfect and lower power, but AMD inexplicably does not offer that.
Also, I’ll add that my 3090 is basically inaudible next to a TV… key is to cap its clocks, and the fans barely even spin up.