Thanks for replying, and your power story does make more sense all things considering. I'm no stranger to homelabbing, in fact just now I'm running both IBM POWER9 system (really power-hungry) as well as AMD 8004, both watercooled now while trying to bring the noise down. The whole rack, along with 100G switches and NIC/FPGA's, is certainly keeping us warm in the winter! And it's only dissipating up to 1.6 kW (mostly, thanks to ridiculous efficiency of 8434PN CPU which is like 48 cores at 150W or sommat)

I cannot imagine dissipating 5 kW at home!

I stick the system in my garage when it is working... I very enthusiastically put it together on the first iteration (with only 8 GPUs) in the living room while the rest of the family was holidaying but that very quickly turned out to be mistake. It has a whole pile of high speed fans mounted in the front and the noise was roughly comparable to sitting in a jet about to take off.

One problem that move caused was that I didn't have a link to the home network in the garage and the files that go to and from that box are pretty large so in the end I strung a UTP cable through a crazy path of little holes everywhere until it reaches the switch in the hallway cupboard. The devil is always in the details...

Running a POWER9 in the house is worthy of a blog post :)

As for Frankie: I fear his days are numbered, I've already been eying more powerful solutions and for the next batch of AI work (most likely large scale video processing and model training) we will probably put something better together, otherwise it will simply take too long.

I almost bought a second hand NVidia fully populated AI workstation but the seller was more than a little bit shady and kept changing the story about how they got it and what they wanted for it. In the end I abandoned that because I didn't feel like being used as a fence for what was looking more and more like stolen property. But buying something like that new is out of the ballpark for me, at 20 to 30% of list I might do it assuming the warranty transfers and that's not a complete fantasy, there are enough research projects that have this kind of gear and sell it off when the project ends.

People joke I don't have a house but a series of connected workshops and that's not that far off the mark :)