SO.... hello. yes i'm alive, not even sure if anyone really cared, but man quite a bit has happened, to put it short, the whole server bit is now completely outdated because that pc is now my "Steam Machine" i decided to add a low profile RTX 3050 that i foudn for actually a good deal, SO that is now gaming thing, for the server i have a kind of useless ThinkPad L450 that i plan to use, but it's meh, i'll update better in this blog post later, no images only writing.
Let's address why i decided to change the whole topic there for the Homelab, well, first, as i did mention for the AI, i do belive there are use and scenario, but i have found myself to not use it almost at all so i have scrapped that idea, and using it for a plex media server it was quite overkill i feel like... but i decided to clear a bit for the AI bit because i feel it can be very dividing, AI is not good overall. yes, of COURSE, it will change and make a fuck ton of work to be useless if not for passion but not for living with it anymore, plus it is being overused in a lot of situation where it is unnecessary, but i do belive that in some moments, having access to a local LM could be useful, all if done locally. i despise Claude, ChatGPT and all the other big groups that are just... feeding shit to us. but to put it short, AI locally managed i think can be the only responsible way to use AI for someone that is not into a big company, where they might do a server room inside dedicated or WHATEVER, but i don't think so, they'll just shove money to Anthropic or OpenAI, but ok, i digress. i wanted to run some LLM locally and as i did mention, well i haven't used them much at all.
Now for the "custom" Steam Machine, well, at first i decided to use it with the APU that's inside, it's a Ryzen 5 PRO (i'll get in the PRO in a bit for a small complain) 3400G, which does have a Vega11 inside, i could play some of the games i've been playing currently, not very heavy ofc, but hey, i was able to play Dark souls remastered in 720p! (i'm a cheap bastard, do not think i'll promise 4k, i don't even care of 4k gaming, fullHD is more than enough for my standards. but for this i might do a rant blog post) and back to us, in the pc i did install Bazzite with the SteamOS setup to get into Gaming Mode so like if it was a Steam deck or similar, and man... IT'S SUCH A GOOD EXPERIENCE, genuinely, i absolutely love how they managed steamOS, i never tried a steam deck, or even really played with big picture much, but it works amazingly... and then, i installed a nvidia gpu... man that was painful. If someone ever checked on linux they know very well that Nvidia is a bitch and doesn't really want to collaborate with any open source project, the reason i got the 3050 is ONLY for the price, for 6gb of vram it was a good deal for me here in italy.
IF anyone else have any problems i really do suggest giving a visit to the Reddit page of Bazzite, i had an issue where it was creating a lot of graphical artifacts, it was just not rendering properly more than half of the frames it was working on, mostly if changing menus and stuff, and i found my fix by changing the slider for vibrancy in the screen settings, but there are plenty of other "fixes" to stabilize your gpu on that, so, give it a look in case. from that point, stuff went out really fine, the only change i want to do is upgrade the CPU, and here is where the PRO thing i did mention comes into play to be annoying. to put it short, yes Lenovo let's you "upgrade" the cpu, but it has to be only from the "PRO" lineup of cpu made for OEM and not for retail, so it has to come from another ThinkCentre or still product of lenovo or others i guess that mounted that processor, but the thing that really does get me is that the Ryzen 5 PRO 3600 and the non PRO version, are LITERALLY the same if not for some software things extra to the pro version for some remote connection and stuff, but the performances are literally the same, sadly if i put any non pro processor in there, it will brick the bios apparently, or lock it, either way, bullshit. SO i am planning to build a new pc that is SFF aswell, with at least a Ryzen 5 3600 but if more modern it's fine too like a 5 5500 or similar, we'll see how that goes
With that said i'm done for now, there are other things i want to talk about but i'll see when i'll be doing those posts, the only thing i will mention also is that I'M ON HOLIDAY LET'S GO, 3 weeks of peace off from work. so i can now play Sekiro and die and suck bad at games, god i have over a thousand hours from the FS games like Dark souls series and Elden ring and stuff, man Sekiro is hard as fuck. anyway, take care reader! see you soon
Brubo