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> I got these 10,000 RPM fans because I wanted to make sure I was moving enough air, and they were the same price as slower fans. They are really loud! I wanted the motherboard to control their speed based on the GPU temperature, and this didn't work at first, so I just wore ear protection during initial setup.

I think everyone remembers the first time they went from "I think I can tolerate some server fans. How loud can they be?" to "I had no idea a small 12V fan could be this loud"

this is when you start thinking... well if a 40mm fan is jet-engine-loud, and an 80mm fan is just leaf-blower loud, and 140mm still spins too fast... maybe I can use a box fan, cardboard, duct tape...

(personally, I have wondered why people didn't do pc system cooling with a car radiator with huge slow fan, a giant reservoir like 5-gal homer bucket with lid or a 55gal drum, and maybe an submersible aquarium pump or two.)

> How loud can they be?

LOL.. for home use I go either fanless (very low power), or 4U chassis even if I don't need the space, just to fit large quiet fans.

1U or 2U at home with fans is not what you want.

Quite courageous to go with AMD. I am very curious to see Chapter 2 and how he solves the software stability that used to plague AMD AI applications.
For shits and giggles I had Claude build out a full voice cloning pipeline that runs completely locally on my Steam Deck. I’ve got Gemma e4b, Qwen and Chatterbox all running on the AMD.
lemon-server is amazing and gets you the right models for your hardware, along with a model router

Add openwebui and/or pi and away you go.

https://lemonade-server.ai/

> Around this time I also realized that I didn't have Ethernet in the garage, so I started cutting holes in the drywall at 11:00 PM.

Ahh, one of those projects

Our definition of "Box of Scraps" is wildly different.
> You'll start depending on it and then it'll get taken away from you.

You can not get around this, conceptually. Local inference will keep depend on updated models for quite a while. Partly because they will contain outdated training data, partly because of demands for the improved models. And it's still not clear where this will lead us. We're still in the rosey phase where people get lured in.

We will try anyway. No need to try to FUD people into passive acceptance of the cloud.
Updated models isn’t the same thing as hosting them somewhere else
Is there any hope that something like unsloth studio will let people retrain models continually so that, when the day comes that there are no good open models being released, something like the final generation of qwen whatever can continue being relevant into the future?
Hermes injects the date/time into the stream, and you tell it to web search for anything newer than the training cutoff date. Works like a charm with deepseek flash.
I ended up buying 2 DGX Sparks interconnected over QSFP with the intention of getting rid (as much as I could) of any cloud-based AI provider. I'm running DS4 Flash 0731 on it and some OCR models, using Oh My Pi and OpenWebUI as my main ways to interface with the agent... and from someone that has been using Claude for a long time, I can definitely say I don't need it anymore. Not for the stuff I'm doing.
One piece of v620 costs about 450 eurobucks on ebay right now. Weird to see a card with no HDMI output at all.
I got mine below $400.
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Those are some pretty meaty scraps, way above what you’d have on several people’s shelves…
I love this! Hacky recycling of old computer parts, home-cooked fan controllers and a website that is just plain HTML with a stylesheet that is so short I don't even have to scroll to read it all. Just write part 2 already, I want to know what you can squeeze out of those AMD cards <3
> The cards had some kind of metal cable guide fin on the back

That's to slot into the front PCI brackets for full length cards. There's "full" size for PCI cards and most GPUs are considered "half" length cards. This is separate to Low Profile, so there are four possible slot compatibility configurations, namely HHHL, HHFL, FHFL, and FHHL. Real workstations(including Mac Pro) has slots cut in the case or a bracket to accept the card or that metal piece(which means a standardized solution to GPU sagging had existed even before PCIe was created).

Also, on fans, it's not like blower fans are quieter at all, but in case anyone encounters a situation where turning up fans seem to be only creating noises without moving air or cooling yhe cards, it might be worth remembering that radial fans have higher static pressure and are better at forcing air through.

edit: ps: people recreating this might want to know what case this is. The vast majority of ATX cases, even unnecessarily big ones, only has 7 PCI slots. Cases that can take four dual-slot cards is rare.

> I printed this out of carbon fiber ASA, but probably boring old PLA would have worked just fine.

I doubt it: PLA begins to soften at as low as 55 degrees Celsius. If there's weight on it, it's worse: the piece shall quickly deform and become unfit for its purpose.

This rig looks like it means business: I think PLA would fail.

If, like me, you cannot print ASA (say because you've got a printer that is not closed and that won't heat enough), then PETG-CF (PETG reinforced with some carbon fiber: it's got better heat deflection than plain PETG) is a safer bet than PLA for parts to put in PCs/servers/rack. Moreover PETG-CF do look really good.

I did a very similar setup with 4x AMD Instinct Mi50. For the air intake I used a single Noctua Industrial PPC 14cm fan, with a 3d printed duct. In the end the cards don't produce that much heat. A single 14cm fan at low speeds was enough to keep them cool at 62 degrees max. A large fan is also more quiet. Also, removing the graphene pad betwee the die and the heatsink, and replacing it with a good paste, helped bring down the temperature by few degrees.
Shame the guy doesn't have an RSS feed? I want to read the next one.

I was recommended the x299. I didn't go with that and I've been struggling with the AM5.