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Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

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101–110 of 236 posts

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#101
This is just a limited recreation of the ancient mikubox from https://rentry.org/lmg-build-guides

Its funny to see people independently "discover" these builds that are a year plus old.

Everyone is sleeping on these guides, but I guess the stink of 4chan scares people away?

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#102
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second I've heard arguments both for and against this, but they always lack concrete numbers. I'd love something like "Here is Qwen2.5 at Q4 quantization running via Ollama + these settings, and M4 24GB RAM gets X tokens/s while RTX 3090ti gets Y tokens/s", otherwise we're just propagating mostly anecdotes without any reality-checks.

I think we are somewhat still at the “fuzzy super early adopter” stage of this local LLM game and hard data is not going to be easy to come by. I almost want to use the word “hobbiest stage” where almost all of the “data” and “best practice” is anecdotal but I think we are a step above that. Still, it’s way to early and there are simply way to many hardware and software combinations that change almost weekly to estab…

> I think we are somewhat still at the “fuzzy super early adopter” stage of this local LLM game and hard data is not going to be easy to come by.

What's hard about it? You get the hardware, you run the software, you take measurements.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#103
post #86

For the same price ($1799) you could buy a Mac Mini with 48gb of unified memory and an m4 pro. It’d probably use less power and be much quieter to run and likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second. I enjoyed the write up still, but I would probably just buy a Mac in this situation.

> likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second I've heard arguments both for and against this, but they always lack concrete numbers. I'd love something like "Here is Qwen2.5 at Q4 quantization running via Ollama + these settings, and M4 24GB RAM gets X tokens/s while RTX 3090ti gets Y tokens/s", otherwise we're just propagating mostly anecdotes without any reality-checks.

On an M1 Max 64GB laptop running gemma2:27b same prompt and settings from blog post

    total duration:       24.919887458s
    load duration:        39.315083ms
    prompt eval count:    37 token(s)
    prompt eval duration: 963.071ms
    prompt eval rate:     38.42 tokens/s
    eval count:           441 token(s)
    eval duration:        23.916616s
    eval rate:            18.44 tokens/s
I have a gaming PC with a 4090 I could try, but I don't think this model would fit

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#104
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we are somewhat still at the “fuzzy super early adopter” stage of this local LLM game and hard data is not going to be easy to come by. I almost want to use the word “hobbiest stage” where almost all of the “data” and “best practice” is anecdotal but I think we are a step above that. Still, it’s way to early and there are simply way to many hardware and software combinations that change almost weekly to estab…

Right, but how are we supposed to be getting anywhere else unless people start being more specific and stop leaning on anecdotes or repeating what they've heard elsewhere? Saying "Apple seems to be somewhat equal to this other setup" doesn't really contribute to someone getting an accurate picture if it is equal or not, unless we start including raw numbers, even if they aren't directly comparable. I don't think it's…

A great thread with the type of info your looking for lives here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/issues/89

But you can likely find similar threads for the llama.cpp benchmark here: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/tree/master/examples/...

These are good examples because the llama.cpp and whisper.cpp benchmarks take full advantage of the Apple hardware but also take full advantage of non-Apple hardware with GPU support, AVX support etc.

It’s been true for a while now that the memory bandwidth of modern Apple systems in tandem with the neural cores and gpu has made them very competitive Nvidia for local inference and even basic training.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#105

For the same price ($1799) you could buy a Mac Mini with 48gb of unified memory and an m4 pro. It’d probably use less power and be much quieter to run and likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second. I enjoyed the write up still, but I would probably just buy a Mac in this situation.

> For the same price ($1799) you could buy a Mac Mini with 48gb of unified memory and an m4 pro.

Around half that price tag was attributed to the blogger reusing an old workstation he had lying around. Beyond this point, OP slapped two graphics cards into an old rig. A better description would be something like "what buying two graphics cards gets you in terms of AI".

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#106
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second I've heard arguments both for and against this, but they always lack concrete numbers. I'd love something like "Here is Qwen2.5 at Q4 quantization running via Ollama + these settings, and M4 24GB RAM gets X tokens/s while RTX 3090ti gets Y tokens/s", otherwise we're just propagating mostly anecdotes without any reality-checks.

On an M1 Max 64GB laptop running gemma2:27b same prompt and settings from blog post total duration: 24.919887458s load duration: 39.315083ms prompt eval count: 37 token(s) prompt eval duration: 963.071ms prompt eval rate: 38.42 tokens/s eval count: 441 token(s) eval duration: 23.916616s eval rate: 18.44 tokens/s I have a gaming PC with a 4090 I could try, but I don't think this model would fit

> gemma2:27b

What quantization are you using? What's the runtime+version you run this with? And the rest of the settings?

Edit: Turns out parent is using Q4 for their test. Doing the same test with LM Studio and a 3090ti + Ryzen 5950X (with 44 layers on GPU, 2 on CPU) I get ~15 tokens/second.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#107
2 x Nvidia Tesla P40 card for €660 is not a thing i consider to be "on a budget".

People can play with "small" or "medium" models less powerfull and cheaper cards. A Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 card with "only" 12Gb VRAM can be found around €200-250 on second hand market (and they are around 300~350 new).

In my opinion, 48Gb of VRAM is overkill to call it "on a budget", for me this setup is nice but it's for semi-professional or professional usage.

There is of course a trade off to use medium or small models, but being "on a budget" is also to do trade off.

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#108
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but how are we supposed to be getting anywhere else unless people start being more specific and stop leaning on anecdotes or repeating what they've heard elsewhere? Saying "Apple seems to be somewhat equal to this other setup" doesn't really contribute to someone getting an accurate picture if it is equal or not, unless we start including raw numbers, even if they aren't directly comparable. I don't think it's…

A great thread with the type of info your looking for lives here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/issues/89 But you can likely find similar threads for the llama.cpp benchmark here: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/tree/master/examples/... These are good examples because the llama.cpp and whisper.cpp benchmarks take full advantage of the Apple hardware but also take full advantage of non-Apple hardware…

I guess I'm mostly lamenting about how unscientific these discussions are in general, on HN and elsewhere (besides specific GitHub repositories). Every community is filled with just anecdotal stories, or some numbers but missing to specify a bunch of settings + model + runtime details so people could at least compare it to something.

Still, thanks for the links :)

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#109
post #86

For the same price ($1799) you could buy a Mac Mini with 48gb of unified memory and an m4 pro. It’d probably use less power and be much quieter to run and likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second. I enjoyed the write up still, but I would probably just buy a Mac in this situation.

> likely could outperform this setup in terms of tokens per second I've heard arguments both for and against this, but they always lack concrete numbers. I'd love something like "Here is Qwen2.5 at Q4 quantization running via Ollama + these settings, and M4 24GB RAM gets X tokens/s while RTX 3090ti gets Y tokens/s", otherwise we're just propagating mostly anecdotes without any reality-checks.

Per the screenshot, this is a DeepSeek running on a 192GB M2 Studio https://nitter.poast.org/ggerganov/status/188461277009384272...

The same on Nvidia (various models) https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/11474

[1] this is a the model: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-GGUF/tree/main/De...

Re: Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget

#110
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On an M1 Max 64GB laptop running gemma2:27b same prompt and settings from blog post total duration: 24.919887458s load duration: 39.315083ms prompt eval count: 37 token(s) prompt eval duration: 963.071ms prompt eval rate: 38.42 tokens/s eval count: 441 token(s) eval duration: 23.916616s eval rate: 18.44 tokens/s I have a gaming PC with a 4090 I could try, but I don't think this model would fit

> gemma2:27b What quantization are you using? What's the runtime+version you run this with? And the rest of the settings? Edit: Turns out parent is using Q4 for their test. Doing the same test with LM Studio and a 3090ti + Ryzen 5950X (with 44 layers on GPU, 2 on CPU) I get ~15 tokens/second.

Fresh install from brew, ollama version is 0.5.7

Only settings I did were the ones shown in the blog post

    OLLAMA_FLASH_ATTENTION=1
    OLLAMA_KV_CACHE_TYPE=q8_0
Ran the model like

    ollama run gemma2:27b --verbose
With the same prompt, "Can you write me a story about a tortoise and a hare, but one that involves a race to get the most tokens per second?"
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