So i’ve recently gone full in on local AI, and i’ve bootstrapped my poor old x570 with 2 amd R9700 GPU’s and have been amazed at watching my little hermes agent actually do stuff.
The success i’ve had with this has made me want to get more PCIE lanes so i can add more cards, obviously i first wanted to buy a full threadripper system, unfortunately RDIMM’s right now are more expensive than the GPU’s themselves (i’ve seen single sticks of 64gb rdimm go for up to 2k each, holy shit XD)
Now if i’m right this would allow me to split my single x16 into 64 lanes (with a bottleneck), even potentially enabling PCIE p2p within my passthrough VM, and giving me the breathing room to add another 2 gpu’s
So far so good, however there appears to be no cases available which could hold both my x570d4u board and this backplane, or even just a standalone case for this.
So i have come here for the wisdom of the crowds, if anyone has tips/suggestions or better yet concrete links to purchasable product, a standalone case would be nice, but if there is a case where i could fit both of these, that’d be the dream.
They typically have the option to add securement where needed. Every board doesn’t have universal mounting holes like ATX. The BTC mine I visitied had PCIe expander boards ziptied to the frames
together with an open-frame mining bench, its a bit jank but i could indeed just tie-rep them to the card
heck if i wanted to at some point i could even go for 10 cards at x8, for a total of 320GB of VRAM, talk about scaling…..though ittd start to compete with my car for power draw at that point
true enough, i’ve ordered an open frame though, i think i’ll just start with a passive pcie to mcio card using bifurcation that should atleast prove the setup for a relatively minor cost, with an easy path forward later
as for the high speed links i’m kind of hoping having P2P would enable that through the PLX chip, sure initial model load from the CPU would take long-ish but i tend to leave the stuff resident in vram anyway
I’ve used bifurcation a lot already with these asrockrack boards, generally speaking not an issue. i’m more interested in getting P2P working with rocm somehow on my janktastic prosumer setup so for me personally the PLX chips are very interesting,
anyway first i’ll start migrating everything to the mining frame once it arrives
Though I’m sure you’ve seen the threads from Wendel where he’s trying to get a software solution in place. PCIe switches are just the cheat code to getting it to reliably to work if your BIOS doesn’t let you prevent PCIe traffic from routing through the CPU.
Ah i haven’t yet actually, i’m pretty new here (though following L1 youtube for years), finally joined the forum because i needed actual help and the discourse here seems mostly honest/positive.
Nvidia’s NVSwitch is basically a very fast and more advanced pcie switch chip, and this is what they use to get a bunch of GPUs into a single server. So using a PLX type chip of older generation for a homebrew consumer setup should work very well.
, though i’m aware that i’m only making an already difficult thing even harder .