SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

Bit of a waffle story but...

So a year ago I wanted an x86 Windows machine for general work and light gaming. I opted for the 'Beelink SER7 Mini Gaming PC, Ryzen 7 7840HS 8-Core 16-Thread 5.1GHz Processor' which is a great mini PC but as with all mini PC's it does something that I really hate with a passion.. Fan noise! ramping up and down in speed and volume and turning into a jet engine when under load. Drives me mad (hugs Mac Studio).

Being a year old I thought I'd 'mod' it before deciding if to buy something shiny and new. After a quick visit to Amazon I bought:

Crucial RAM 64GB Kit (2x32GB) DDR5 5600MHz
Samsung 990 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD, 1 TB
Noctua NF-A12x25 5V PWM, Premium Quiet Fan with USB Power Adaptor Cable

Thought behind this was:

Upgrade to 64GB RAM - Hopefully will give some room to run some local AI stuff and increase the dedicated GPU RAM.
1TB NVMe - Why not, it has a free socket so let's slap some more storage space in there.
120mm fan - Wait, what!. Ahh, this was my master plan. Rip out the internal laptop style jet engine fan, add more copper heatsinks, take the top off the mini PC, adapt the fan to use a speed selector switch and then sit it on top of the mini PC. Perfect fit \o/

I have the Noctua fan running constantly at half speed. Not silent but easily quiet enough to not be any bother and main thing, no ramping up and down during load. Works really well as I now have a resting temperature of 27 degrees.

Now to test what happens under sustained full load.. I really wanted to be able to mess around with AI / LLM stuff but the built in AMD 780m, which while pretty impressive for an iGPU just loves to crash the system when it comes to generating AI images via ComfyUI with SDXL checkpoints and don't even try Flux models.

Anyone who's messed with running AI generation / LLM's on a windows PC knows that nVidia is king thanks to it's CUDA cores. My poor little AMD 780m iGPU doesn't have such things but hang on, there's a thing called Zluda which can 'run unmodified CUDA applications using non-NVIDIA GPUs with near-native performance'.

Naturally it's not quite as easy as that so I needed to change my drivers to AMD's PRO edition with the HIP SDK which includes the AMD ROCm Platform that was previously for Linux. After that I needed specific libraries to replace the ROCm ones to support the 780m iGPU and finally patch the Zluda app so everything works together. Yeah I know, a whole lot of messing around but who doesn't like a challenge

With all that done I could finally test the Zluda enhanced version of ComfyUI. I fully expected a hard crash but it worked! using an 8GB SDXL model loaded into GPU I was able to generate a 1024x1024 image in just over a minute. Pretty similar speed to my Mac Studio M1, happy days.

But the main test was to see if the mini PC could handle long sustained full loads without overheating, crashing out or generally making me cry that all my work was in vain. So to really stress it I plonked into ComfyUI a full Flux workload, model, clips, 1024x1024 image with 4x upscaling. Set it going and waited for the flames to come out the side of my mini PC followed by a hard crash. Amazingly the little beauty didn't crash and completed the full Flux model generation. The temps never went past 65 degrees and once finished happily ticked down to 27-29 degrees.

Overall, very happy with my little adventures in upgrading / modding my mini PC.

I got a new laptop a couple of days ago 16 ram much improved storage with 512 gigs. Windows 11 home. oh yeah and it's an i5 up to 4.6 gigs. Although I have integrated graphics still they are much improved. The screen broke on my latest but one so removed the screen and now it's a nice desktop.
 

Congrats on the upgrade. 

Yeah fan noise can be a pain and Noctua are the best for cutting down noise levels, I really appreciate my MacBook Pro in that regard. But my PC in general use hums along nicely for Photoshop and web browsing using just the CPU cooling fan. My graphics card uses a huge heatsink/pipe system which is largely silent but pipes up from time to time. 

Again a good choice of RAM, I think 64GB is the sweet spot for a modern system.

Looks like you had a 'fun time' getting things running as you wanted - but well done on the outcome. 

I've got what I think is a pretty good beast of a windows laptop that I bought around 18 months ago now. I don't really fire it up much as I use my M2 Pro mini for pretty much anything computing day to day, but it's there for the windows stuff that I can't emulate any other way. Some games are meant to be played with a mouse, so I got it to play Diablo 4 properly, after trying it on PS5 and hating it. Also tried space skyrim (interstellar, is it?) that I bought and only ever loaded once because I just didn't feel it. Stuff like those games that won't be coming to Mac any time soon.

Anyway, as it's a laptop, and not used mostly, I thought I'd just set it up to keep the lid down all the time and mostly on sleep mode. I have a logitech mouse/keyboard combination that let you set up to run on 3 different devices, so I have a seperate config for the Mac and this laptop which can be toggled by pressing one of the 3 config keys, or a switch on the bottom of the mouse. First problem was trying to find a way for the laptop to automatically fire up as soon as i switched to the windows config, and boot up. Only way I eventually found was to set usb wake in the bios and plug in an old mouse into the usb port so I can tap the button on that to wake it. As long as it hasn't shut down completely. I did all this because i have a desk tidy stand to hold two monitors, and it has a shelf under it, so there's not much space for a laptop unless it's slid under the desk tidy itself. With all the leads coming out of it, I lose cables out the back that are a right pain to put back in if I slide the laptop out to far to try and turn it on by a button. It's a right pain in the butt, hence my work-around.

What's all this got to do with the modding of PC's, you're probably all asking, as I've been waffling a bit. Well, it's the bloody fan noise. It kicks in as loud as anything just because it's turned on. Will generally quieten down as long as I'm only using it for basic Windows stuff, but fire up even a simple indy game and it's roaring in the damn thing, just because the lid is down, I assume.

Seriously starting to wonder if I should have just gone for a small, decent-spec mini pc instead and rejigged all the drives and equipment on my desk.