I have an unused dell optiplex 7010 i wanted to use as a base for an interference rig.

My idea was to get a 3060, a pci riser and 500w power supply just for the gpu. Mechanically speaking i had the idea of making a backpack of sorts on the side panel, to fit both the gpu and the extra power supply since unfortunately it’s an sff machine.

What’s making me weary of going through is the specs of the 7010 itself: it’s a ddr3 system with a 3rd gen i7-3770. I have the feeling that as soon as it ends up offloading some of the model into system ram is going to slow down to a crawl. (Using koboldcpp, if that matters.)

Do you think it’s even worth going through?

Edit: i may have found a thinkcenter that uses ddr4 and that i can buy if i manage to sell the 7010. Though i still don’t know if it will be good enough.

  • brokenlcd@feddit.itOPEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Did you say you’re using a x1 riser though? That splits it to a sixteenth of the bandwidth—maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean by x1.

    not exactly, what i mean by x1 riser is one of these bad boys they are basically extension cords for a x1 pcie link, no bifurcation. the thinkcenter has 1 x16 slot and two x1 slots. my idea for the whole setup was to have the 3060 i’m getting now into the x16 slot of the motherboard, so it can be used for other tasks as well if need’s be; while the second 3060 would be placed in one of the x1 slots the motherboard has via the riser; since from what i managed to read it should only affect the time to first load the model. but the fact you only mentioned the x16 slot does make me worry if there is some handicap to the other two x1 slots.

    of course, the second card will come down the line; don’t have nearly enough money for two cards and the thinkcentre :-P.

    started with my decade-old ThinkPad inferencing Llama 3.1 8B at about 1 TPS

    pretty mutch same story, but with the optiplex and the steam deck. come to think of it, i do need to polish and share the scripts i wrote for the steam deck, since i designed them to be used without a dock, they’re a wonderful gateway drug to this hobby :-).

    there’s a popular way to squeeze performance through Mixture of Experts (MoE) models.

    yeah, that’s a little too out of scope for me, i’m more practical with the hardware side of things, mostly due to lacking hardware to really get into the more involved stuff. though it’s not out of question for the future :-).

    Tesla P100 16GB

    i am somewhat familiar with these bad boys, we have an older poweredge server full of them at work, where it’s used for fluid simulation, (i’d love to see how it’s set up, but can’t risk bricking the workhorse) but the need to figure out a cooling system for these cards, plus the higher power draw made it not really feasible in my budget unfortunately.