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!
You can boost the 395 up to 120W, which might be where Framework is pushing it too, but those benchmarks are labelled 55W and that's what AMD says is the default clock without adjustment. I'd love to see how the benchmarks compare at that higher boost but I'd imagine it's diminishing returns similar to most GPUs. I think the benefit to using it in a lounge gaming PC would be the super low power draw, but you would need to figure out a display MUX switch and I don't think that's simple with desktop cards. Maybe something with a 5090 mobile would be the go at that point, but I have no idea how that compares to the 395 and whether it's worth it.
Mobile 5090 would be an underclocked, binned desktop 5080, AFAIK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_50_series
In KCD2 (a fantastic CryEngine game, a great benchmark IMO), at QHD, the APU is a hair less half as fast. For instance, 39 FPS at QHD vs 84 FPS for the mobile 5090:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Nvidia-GeForce-RTX-5090-Laptop-Benchmarks-and-Specs.934947.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-8060S-Benchmarks-and-Specs.942049.0.html
Synthetic benchmarks between the two
But these are both presumably running at high TDP (150W for the 5090). Also, the mobile 5090 is catastrophically overpriced and inevitably tied to a weaker CPU, whereas the APU is a monster of a CPU. So make of that what you will.