My current PC specs:
- Dell Precision T1700 Motherboard
- Xeon E3 1275 v3
- 32GB DDR3 1600Mhz ECC
- 7900 XTX 24GB VRAM (Transferring to new PC)
What I want in my next PC:
- MSI Z790-P Motherboard (with Dasharo)
- i9-14900k
- DDR5 192GB 5600Mhz (Non-ECC)
- 7900 XTX 24GB VRAM
Will I see any performance increase? I’m also worried about not having ECC RAM, I will be coding a lot with my LLMs (firmware development), so part of me doesn’t want to make any mistakes and future proof. I heard DDR5 has some ECC-like features, but not the same as traditional ECC. Maybe I should buy a Dell Precision 3630 motherboard which has support for upto 128GB DDR4 ECC memory? This is a dedicated LLM PC, so, not too concerned about gaming or anything.
I would like to hear your suggestions!
Don’t you need tons of RAM to run LLMs? I thought the newer models needed up to 64GB RAM? Also, what about Stable Diffusion?
VRAM. Not system RAM. LLMs run best entirely on the GPU.
Ram is important but it has to be vram not system ram.
Only MacBooks can use the system ram because they have an integrated GPU rather than a dedicated one.
Stable diffusion is the same situation.
Taking ollama for instance, either the whole model runs in vram and compute is done on the gpu, or it runs in system ram and compute is done on the cpu. Running models on CPU is horribly slow. You won’t want to do it for large models
LM studio and others allow you to run part of the model on GPU and part on CPU, splitting memory requirements but still pretty slow.
Even the smaller 7B parameter models run pretty slow in CPU and the huge models are orders of magnitude slower
So technically more system ram will let you run some larger models but you will quickly figure out you just don’t want to do it.
They do, but VRAM. Unfortunately, the cards that do have that much of memory are used by OEMs/corporations and are insanely pricey