Tag: linux
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8 Tokens a Second
Eight tokens a second. That is the number that ended my experiment with running AI locally, and it is the reason my personal AI stack now sits on someone else’s GPUs.
I did not want that outcome. I run a homelab specifically because I like owning the thing that does the work. But after a few months of trying, the honest answer is that local inference did not earn its place, and the reasons are more interesting than “it was slow”.
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The ¥45,800 Offsite Backup
I did not go to Japan to buy a laptop. I wasn’t even intending to buy the parts for a desktop that was supposed to be a server, which is its own story. But a second-hand ThinkPad X13 sitting on a shelf at ¥45,800 is the kind of thing that follows you home, and at 125.3 yen to the Singapore dollar that worked out to S$366.
For S$366 I got six cores, 32GB of RAM and a machine that now holds the only copy of my homelab that does not live in my house. That last part is what this post is actually about. The laptop is the cheap bit. The job it does is an interesting outcome of my homelab journey.
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Building Gilgalad Was Never the Plan
I have a regular cadence for building PCs. My first PC was bought in 1994. The next one was in 1999. A laptop in 2004. Then desktops in 2009, 2014, 2019 and 2024. A 5 year gap between PC builds, with frequent GPU upgrades along the way to keep up with hardware requirements. But sometimes, extreme situations and extenuating circumstances can change even the best laid plans. I wasn’t looking to build a new PC for another 3 years, because my existing Windows box already scored better than 87% of all results on 3DMark Time Spy:
This is the story of how and why I built Gilgalad in December 2025, right as DDR5 prices started climbing out of control. A 32GB kit of Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR5 6000 CL36 I’d bought for S$120 in 2024 was going for S$500 by the time it went in the machine, if it had gone in clean. Which it didn’t. Murphy’s law strikes again!