AboutProjectsBlog

Week 30, 2025

Projects

Project status has been quiet this week as usual as I dealt with improvements to personal health and work.

MediaCow Touch 2

I really, really need to get back onto this project again. More than myself relies on the completion of this project within a reasonable amount of time.

Knowing where to pick up where I left off has been a difficulty in this. What I have left off on as of July 27 is the block diagram which I should continue that as soon as I can.

Old website domain

With the ctcl-tech.com domain I thought I turned off renew for as I discontinued using Namecheap in 2023, somehow got renewed for US$17.80 on July 27th. I did not expect the payment to go through as it was on a now-invalid debit card.

I may end up making use of this domain again for something, likely as a redirect to ctcl.lgbt.

AI Workstation Build - "Polyvinyl Chloride"

Yes, I am still using codenames for computer systems. This build is to introduce a desktop system optimized for use with large-scale AI models.

Introduction

Planning for this build started on July 21st when I discontinued using ChatGPT altogether, even prematurely ending a Plus subscription.

I decided that if I want to continue exploring AI, I am going to have to take hosting and management into my own hands. This system is to completely localize use of AI models, especially LLMs, while allowing for fine-tuning and other modifications to fit my usecase.

Hardware

This desktop is going to a mix of new parts and somewhat old parts. The plan so far is:

With PCIe 3.0 being provided by the AMD EPYC 7371, bottlenecks in the communication between the CPU and GPU may become an issue under some circumstances and I may have to implement something in software to mitigate slowdowns caused by the bandwidth limitations.

I scrapped the idea of using an RTX 3090 24GB along with an A100 40GB being added later as using a single GPU, the RTX 5090 32GB. Using a single GPU, the 5090, is more financially viable and likely to be less affected by the PCIe 3.0 bandwidth limit.

256GB+ seems like a lot for 99% of workloads but for AI, massive amounts of RAM is important to have. I have considered finding 64GB modules for a 512GB configuration but they often have DDP RAM packages and as a result have quad-rank architecture that may impact memory performance. There may be some 64GB modules with 16Gbit monolithic DRAM but I doubt they would be cheap.

Case fans are to be determined when I figure out the cooling requirements. I expect that high amounts of ariflow is required for this build.

Theming

With a build with this much power, I am going to make it count; not have it look like another green PCB shoved in a cheap case like my past builds with Supermicro motherboards. I may use the same aesthetics that I have already been using for MediaCow Touch 2 and this website which is sort of a grayscale gothic theme.

Finance

This system is not going to be cheap by any means and I am going to have to raise a large sum of money in order to make this happen. I am turning to side jobs and other one-time work alongside work at 2nd Life.

2nd Life Inc.

Entering the third week, I worked on different types of hardware

Day 7 - July 23, 2025

I do not have much logged for this day apart from working on AIOs and monitors.

Day 8 - July 24, 2025

On this day, I managed to get over seven Dell OptiPlex 3020 and 3040 systems inspected within a hour period. The 3040's were somewhat interesting where they used DDR3 memory with Intel Skylake (6th Gen) CPUs. Given the very small size of these systems along with their intended use as client systems, any benefit in using DDR4 would be marginal.

Day 9 - July 25, 2025

On this day, I continued with the usual laptop and AIO work.

At first, I started to pull SSDs out of laptops from a pallet labeled REMOVE DRIVES. I started inspecting these units as normal then removing the drive afterwards since they would need to be inspected anyway. I picked up a stack of Dell Latitude 2120 laptops, they were tiny with 10.1" displays, I have always found tiny laptops interesting due to the idea of them being easier to carry and use on the go. I noticed the Intel Atom N550 CPUs being used did not have PowerVR GPU cores unlike other Atom CPUs I worked with in the past. Due to not using PowerVR GPU cores, they should have better driver support on Linux and BSD.

I noticed some of the Dell PowerEdge VRTX hardware being moved up to the inspection area. I kept an eye on these in the inventory management system since they were delivered on July 18. I got to start working on inspecting these servers. I spent a lot of time just waiting for these machines to start up, often the chassis interface being locked while the CMC (Chassis Management Controller) module boots.

All of them seemed to use dual Intel Xeon Gold 6132 and 96GB of RAM, all SK hynix so far.

CTCL 2018-2025