Man, I’m bad at this. Last time in the PC-upgrading adventures, I apparently put an RTX 3090 in my main box, along with a Ryzen 9 5950X. I put 128GB of RAM in it, because why not? The final round of updates saw the addition of another 4TB SSD, mostly because the other 4TB HDD was nearly full.
But really, the Alt Box is where the interesting revelations happened. It had a janky RTX 1060 that might have migrated its way there from my main box 2-3 upgrades ago. A weekly chat with some friends about “AI” shenanigans and local “AI” installs led to the obnoxiousness of ‘rolling your own Stable Diffusion setup’ which led to “Have you tried Easy Diffusion?” Why, no, no I haven’t!
After installing Easy Diffusion (it has a convenient packaged installer!) and kicking the tires, it was taking ~10 minutes to render even the simplest stuff — too long to be a useful iterative toy/thing. I resisted for a week or three and then decided to check and see what the main box has in it — apparently, I sunk a 3090 into it at some point (even though I can’t find the receipt for it anywhere). Needless to say, it was revelatory how _fast_ Easy Diffusion could be on a 3090.
So, I started looking for a GPU upgrade for the alt box, and being largely disappointed in everything — new or secondary market. I did eventually find a 3090 on Craigslist for ‘market’ price for a used card (they just cost what they cost, it seems), so I pulled the trigger and now I have myself a nice little local-“AI”-sandbox to play with Easy Diffusion, Ollama, and any other “AI” stuff I want to muck with. I also put some ‘modern’ m2 SSDs and 64GB of RAM in, because why not?
I probably should mention that Lenovo Legion lappy and some of the RPi shenanigans I’ve been kicking around, but those can have their own post.
Other next upgrades / projects? NAS, 3d Printering, RPi projects