Comment by lnenad
16 hours ago
I have just built an Epyc with 512gb DDR4 3200 RAM for a "reasonable" price and I'm hoping to have a setup with GLM as the architect and Qwen 27b/Next Flash as the implementer. This is 1/5 of the price of the Mac, but also probably 1/5 of the speed lol.
I’ll be very curious what you get with DDR4. I also almost went that way. I have an Epyc DDR 5 rig and the best I see is 10 tok/s. Caveat being that’s at Q8 and a 4090 doing pre fill so it could be pushed up.
The surprising thing for me is how much work you will need to cool the banks if you’re near your memory ceiling. My memory starts soft throttling at about 74C (dies may be hotter, that’s the bank temp) and will turn down speed to try to stay below 80.
Happy to send my llama.cpp config settings if you want it.
I am getting 10t/s on unsloth's Q3kxl with 2x3090s@250w. It's enough for me for now. I will probably upgrade the GPUs down the line. DDR5 would have made the price of the machine double and I just wasn't prepared to pay that much.
Temp wise, no throttling, surprisingly cool.
Typically computers with these larger memory amounts have fans that scream like a banshee trying to move impossible amounts of air over the memory and CPU. Getting something both cool and quite can be a bit difficult.
I was running one of the older llamas (3.1 I think?) at slow-ish (10-20 tok/sec at Q4?) but OK speeds on 12 year old DDR3 ECC Xeon machine
I find 10 to be very usable. It’s not (that) interactive but it chews through tasks. I let Kimi churn away at 4 overnight and it gives good results that are ready for me in the morning.
Depending on which Epyc you got it might be slower than 1/5 of the speed.
48c 7643. I'm getting about 10tps @Q3kxl with 2x3090s.
Curious about that price, if you don't mind sharing a ballpark
About 5k with RAM and GPUs bought used. Eastern Europe.
I have a dual epyc + 1TB RAM. I could push glm 5.2 to 7 tok/s CPU only.
It’s not unified ram? I.e VRAM so it will struggle
I'm getting about 10tps @Q3kxl with 2x3090s.
Honestly I suspect neither of them will be performing terribly well but with DDR4 3200 RAM I wonder if you'll be counting tokens per second or seconds per token. I mean, you do at least get a lot of memory channels at least, compared to consumer PCs. I am curious to hear what performance you get, I feel there is not enough information out there on what different setups manage to eek out.
The fastest I was able to get my Threadripper 3960X + 2x 3090s + 256GB DDR4-3200 to run a 2-bit quant of GLM-5.2 was 8 TPS. I would expect to be in seconds-per-token territory for a pure-CPU 4-bit quant.
One thing I'd like to try is MoE offloading: I have 2x32 GiB of VRAM and 128 GiB of DDR5 running at 4800 MT/s (only 2 channels though). I've seen people post difficult to believe MoE offloading results albeit a decently long time ago with older models. Maybe there is a quant that would fit with MoE offloading?
That said, I am guessing my problem is not enough RAM - but this poor consumer platform struggles to do memory training with 128 GiB as it is.
Now I surely regret not having gotten Threadripper and 256 GiB of RAM in the before-times.
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With a 4-bit quant of GLM-5.2, I can get about 0.8-1.1 tok/s on an underclocked dual Xeon E5-2698 v4 with 512GiB of DDR4-2400. I think it was specifically a Q4_K_M quant. Of course, the time-to-first-token is absolutely atrocious.
Which is completely insane for a ten year old configuration.
What model are you interested in? DS Flash 0731@Q4KXL I'm about 25-30tps. Same as the new Qwen3.8 Flash Next. The new GLM 5.3Q3KXL at 10tps. I've got 2x3090s which I didn't mention in the original message.