Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT
Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT
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.
Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT
Had some complications but it's installed and working.
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Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT
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.
Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT
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.
Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT
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.
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.
Re: Maxing out Dell XPS 435MT
First attempt to boot Linux on this system. Tried my existing Ubuntu stick. Oops, system too old for UEFI.
Formatted the USB stick with Ventoy and dropped the Ubuntu ISO on there. Wouldn't boot from most USB ports except for certain ones at the back. Had to change some boot order stuff in BIOS. Then the GNOME session crashed but the watchdog timer restarted it for my convenience. Didn't take too long to realize I had no network. No, not this again.
Lots of troubleshooting aided by Adam and real AI, to no avail.
It looked like I had a network but I clicked and it froze....
Long story short, I had knocked the ethernet cable slightly out of place (the clip is missing - I now recall Ian mentioning this) when I was fiddling in the back to get the USB stick inserted. Whoops. This one is on me. Restarted again and....
Now we are getting somewhere. Messed around a little by playing a Cleetus video at 1080p60 which it did mostly fine but did drop some frames. Then it was bed time. There goes 2 hours of my time. But this is progress.
Probably what I will do next is choose one of my spare SSDs (probably the old Intel 520 240GB that I had in my VAIO with Win 10 on it) and install that into the fourth SATA port and just dual boot Ubuntu like on my Surface Laptop. No harm in that. I just need to think if I have any files on that drive that I really need. I guess I could just connect it and look in Windows first.
Now we are getting somewhere. Messed around a little by playing a Cleetus video at 1080p60 which it did mostly fine but did drop some frames. Then it was bed time. There goes 2 hours of my time. But this is progress.
Probably what I will do next is choose one of my spare SSDs (probably the old Intel 520 240GB that I had in my VAIO with Win 10 on it) and install that into the fourth SATA port and just dual boot Ubuntu like on my Surface Laptop. No harm in that. I just need to think if I have any files on that drive that I really need. I guess I could just connect it and look in Windows first.
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