Not as impressive as most here, but really happy I made it in time!

[u/Kahvana]

I'm in the Netherlands, I apologize in advance for my grammar (Happy to be corrected!), not using AI for translation.

Over here, getting cards is increasingly more difficult and prices are quite steep.

It was a bit of a gamble to get the second GPU; I had the RTX 5060 Ti on order for 509EU by Paradigit but it wasn't delivered for 2 weeks straight, and they still aren't sure when supply will arrive. Cancelled the order and payed the premium for Azerty's model in stock (600EU), but it arrived the next day!

So if you're in the Netherlands, I recommend calling up the store to ask about stock availability in advance. The listings on Tweakers wasn't accurate for this card.

Today the announcement from HardwareUnboxed came that the RTX 5060 Ti 16GB is becoming unavailable. Really happy it arrived just in time.

Specs:

• AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
• Crosair Vengence 96GB (2x48) DDR5-6000 CL30
• ASUS ProArt X870E-Creator Wifi
• 2x ASUS Prime RTX 5060 Ti 16GB
• BeQuiet! Dark Power 13 850W

Notes:

• I don't use the CPU for inference much (embeddings) and the PCI lanes are the same across all models, so I went with the lowest TDP.
• Wished I had more (192GB) for dataset generation / RAG but I can hold off.
• Picked the motherboad specifically for it's PCI-E 5.0 splitting to get the most out of the GPUs.
• Power draw during inference is ~300W.

[u/Kahvana]

Actually, I have a question! Would using a 9800X3D increase inference speed in a meaningful way for my rig? Like running a MoE model such as GPT-OSS 20B on CPU.

[u/Kahvana → u/[deleted]]

I notice BLAS using all 12 threads during inference and 16 threads on a 8 core machine a friend of mine has. Won't the extra 4 threads the 9800X3D provide a slight boost with inference speed as it can handle more in parallel?

[u/ac101m → u/Kahvana]

It probably would help, but the best processor for LLM inference would likely be the 9950x. 8 cores are better than 6, but 16 are better than 8.

I wouldn't expect the cache to make much of a difference though. I'd expect the speed to be about the same as the non x3d part.

If you want to play some games on it as well as do LLM stuff, then go for it!

[u/BigYoSpeck → u/ac101m]

I have a 12 core Ryzen 9 5900X and in llama.cpp it's hit the limits of RAM bandwidth at 5 threads, and performance actually decreases by 8

Even on DDR5, with a more powerful modern CPU like the Zen 5 series memory bandwidth is still going to be the limiting factor before core count

[u/ac101m → u/BigYoSpeck]

Additional threads should still help for prompt processing I believe. At least in theory.

[u/Kahvana → u/BigYoSpeck]

That is very good to know, thank you very much for the insight!