Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT

It's that beige box on your floor. In 1999.
kevm14
Posts: 16355
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:28 pm

Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT

Post by kevm14 »

Ordered an RTX 3060 12GB for $230. According to copilot that is about as much GPU as this old computer can use without being hopelessly CPU bound.
kevm14
Posts: 16355
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:28 pm

Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT

Post by kevm14 »

Had some complications but it's installed and working.
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Adam
Posts: 2277
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 9:50 pm

Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT

Post by Adam »

The RTX 3000 series card is only 2 generations old, so you should get driver support for a while still. Your next bottleneck will probably be PCIe 2.0. Things like tranfering very large textures will start to impact loading times. General performance, once loaded, should be unaffected until such a time as your CPU isn't quite enough. If you are running LLMs, this will make the model/context loads take longer as well.
kevm14
Posts: 16355
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:28 pm

Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT

Post by kevm14 »

As I gathered and have been complaining about, Ian was able to increase performance by screwing around with some settings in the Nvidia drivers. I didn't ask what the settings were. There may also have been some game settings. Like he was saying in Beam.NG, he was saying you can shift processing of the AI cars to the GPU instead of CPU threads.
kevm14
Posts: 16355
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2013 10:28 pm

Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT

Post by kevm14 »

Installed AnythingLLM and run some stuff on my RTX 3060. Works pretty well. Did llama for text only and llama vision to interpret an image I sent it. Performance is quite acceptable. Llama vision took up nearly the full 12GB VRAM on the RTX. Neat.

I still cannot believe the mileage I have gotten from this machine that I bought in 2009 from the Dell Outlet. It's now 17 years old (well, the motherboard and case is). I could upgrade the CPU even further if it weren't for the lame OEM Dell BIOS. Latest CPU this X58 chipset supports would be the Gulftown 6 core CPUs but alas I am limited to 4 core Bloomfield CPUs, and already running the max (Xeon) that it can handle, which by the way, IS a 17 year old CPU, anyway.
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