Prologue: The Hardware
It all began with a friend sending me a link to a cheap AI NVidia card, the RTX 2000 Pro Blackwell. For “just” 800 bucks you could have 16 Gb of VRAM for a little AI machine.
The idea intrigued me, as I’ve always dreamt about a separate machine to provide the power for a coding assistent or image generation while I still had the GPU and VRam on my gaming pc free for other stuff.
I looked at it for a while and realized: This would be a downgrade!
My current gaming pc has a NVidia RTX 4090 with 24 Gb VRAM. It allowed me to load quite a selection of models and use them for generative AIs. The new card only had 16, so I would not be able to load as much.
I tried to build a PC and put two of those in, but the sites I visited only offered PCs capable of containing one of those beasts. So…
I thought: “You just had your [censored] birthday, gift yourself a cool machine!”
And that’s what I did. 🙂
At first I ended up on a site only selling to companies, then I found out that – for some weird reasons – the prices on some of them excluded taxes. That meant that they were almost 20% more expensive at the checkout than they were in the shelf. T_T
I thought about it some more and ended up with a YOLO feeling and… just bought it.
The configuration I ended up with:
| CPU | Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 20-Core-CPU265K (up to 5,5GHz) 30 MB Cache |
| Mainboard | ASUS® PRIME Z890-P WIFI (LGA1851, DDR5, M.2 PCIe 5.0, Wi-Fi 7) |
| RAM | 32 GB PCS PRO DDR5 5600 MHz CL46 (1 x 32GB) |
| GPU | 48 GB PNY NVIDIA RTX Pro 5000 Blackwell, 14080 CUDA-CORES, 4x DP |
| 1. M.2 SSD | 1 TB CRUCIAL T710 GEN 5 M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (bis zu 14,900 MB/sR, 13,700 MB/sW) |
| 2. M.2 SSD | 2 TB SAMSUNG 990 PRO M.2, PCIe 4.0 NVMe (bis zu 7450 MB/R, 6900 MB/W) |
| 3. M.2 SSD | 2 TB CRUCIAL E100 GEN 4 M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (bis zu 5000 MB/sR, 4500 MB/sW) |
48 Gb of VRAM! That was double the amount I had before. That should mean something, right? Well, I guess we have to wait and see.
At first I thought that I won’t need much RAM as most of the stuff is happening in the VRAM, but right after I ordered it and they started assembling it, I looked at some posts and decided to get more…
The Memory Switcheroo
Memory does not seem to be easy to get a hold of nowadays. I started on Amazon as I usually do, but I specifically wanted to get the same RAM that was already in there, so I had two identical 32 Gb memory modules.
In the end I returned to eBay where I got most of my collection of over 1,000 DVDs and Blu-rays in the good old days.
I found an okay offer for 340€ and grabbed it. The seller seemed trustworthy and quickly sent the package out and even showed a photo of the item with the invoice.
In the meantime, I installed Win 11 and found out that (using the vanilla setup) you could not skip using an online MS account anymore. I don’t know what they need all those fake temp accounts for…
Of course, I switched back to a local account right after installation.
A few days later, I received it and opened it to find… a 16 Gb module.
First thought: Fraud
Second thought: Did I misread it?
I checked the original eBay offer and it said 32 Gb. The invoice said 32 Gb (the one in my hand and the one on the photo). Then I zoomed in and saw that you could see the 16 Gb module on the photo with the 32 Gb invoice.
That helped me calm down a bit as I had proof now and it was unlikely that a fraudulent dealer would provide something like this.
So, after contacting him, the issue was resolved and a week later I got the correct 32 Gb memory module and the next phase started.