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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1d ago (text post)   235 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for July 14th, 2026

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.

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Last week I whined that I really should have gone the Full Monty right away on my graphics card, mostly because I'm having so much fun dicking around with local LLMs but want more out of them. Today I stumbled upon the elegant solution of buying a used 3090 and a 1200 watt power supply (which I would have needed for the better card anyway) to get myself to a nice respectable 40 gigs of VRAM, which is oh-so-tantalizingly close to being able to run a full 70b model at the desired Q4_K_M. Odin dammit but do I ever wanna pull the trigger and spend another ~$1500 to net myself that headroom!

That is all. For now...

I'll caution that mixing different sizes of memory and generations of card means you're really going to want to stick with llama.cpp over vLLM, and be limited in hardware dtype support. For casual home use, that's fine, but there's a lot of talk about FP8, FP4, NVFP4, that just won't be worth it for you.

It's like you know me or something!

The underlying issue that I have is that my motherboard is not ideal for dual GPU setup either, offering only PCIE4x4 for a secondary GPU, so when if I find myself that deep in the rabbit hole, the deal that I am making with future me is that I'll evaluate my options at that point with an eye towards still trying to keep the price reasonable and thus getting a motherboard that'll give me 2x8 for PCIE and probably a second 3090, because if I start thinking too much about that now, I might be a little too tempted to roll the dice on one of the many superficially good-looking but probably fraudulent eBay classified ads that'll tie up a non-trivial amount of cash for a month or two while I work a CC dispute claim to its inevitable conclusion. It's a good story I'm telling myself, right?

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