Things I build, play with, and think about.

Benchmarks and photos from the latest PC build — motherboard troubleshooting, thermal tuning, and the satisfaction of a stable POST screen. This build features a custom water loop with a 360mm radiator, push-pull fan config, and carefully managed cable routing. The system posts stable at 5.2 GHz all-core with a 1.28V undervolt.

Initial Cinebench R23 scores hit 28,500 multi-core, with peak temps staying under 78°C after an hour of sustained load. The curve optimizer was tuned per-core to balance thermals and clock consistency. Memory timing tweaks on the DDR5 kit yielded a 4% latency improvement over XMP defaults.

Spent an afternoon tuning frame pacing and input latency in Black Myth: Wukong. The difference a well-curved fan profile makes under sustained load is remarkable — GPU hotspot dropped 11°C while maintaining boost clocks within 25 MHz of the thermal limit.

Used FrameView and PresentMon to capture 1% and 0.1% lows before and after tuning. The stock fan curve let the GPU hit 84°C before ramping, causing visible stutter every 30-40 seconds. After a custom curve that pre-emptively ramps at 65°C, those micro-stutters disappeared entirely. Average frame time went from 16.8ms to 14.2ms with tighter variance.

Also experimented with GPU driver scheduling and Reflex Low Latency mode. Reflex gave a consistent 8-10ms reduction in system latency at 4K DLSS Quality, though the improvement was less noticeable at lower resolutions.

Tracking down a capacitor-level issue on an older motherboard. Multimeter, schematic, and a lot of patience. The board would power on for roughly 3 seconds, then cut power and restart — a classic boot loop with no POST code visible.

Started with the PSU — swapped in a known-good unit, same behaviour. Pulled the board and inspected the VRM area under magnification. Found a bulging 330 µF capacitor near the CPU socket that wasn't obvious to the naked eye. ESR measured at 18 ohms vs the expected 0.2 ohms.

Replaced the cap with a matching low-ESR Nichicon from the parts bin, and the board POSTed first try. The full diagnosis process — from symptom observation to component-level repair — took about three hours and is a good reference for anyone dealing with similar issues on that chipset.

Re-cased the daily driver — mapped airflow with thermocouples and tweaked the fan curve until noise and thermals settled into a happy medium. The new case supports a bottom-to-top airflow layout with filtered intakes, which reduced dust accumulation by roughly 60% compared to the previous front-intake configuration.

Placed K-type thermocouples at six points: GPU intake, CPU socket area, rear exhaust, top rad exhaust, PSU intake, and ambient. Recorded temps under idle, gaming, and full synthetic load. The biggest improvement came from adding a bottom intake fan directly under the GPU — dropped VRAM temps by 8°C under load.

The fan curve was tuned to be silent at idle (below 40°C) and ramp linearly between 50°C and 75°C. At full load the system is audible but not intrusive — measured 38 dBA at 1 metre, down from 44 dBA in the old case.

Spun up a small Proxmox node to test containerised agent workflows in isolation. The hardware is modest — a Lenovo M720q Tiny with a 6-core i5, 32 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB NVMe — but it's been a great platform for learning container orchestration and network isolation.

Currently running three LXC containers: one for a lightweight Docker registry, one for a test LangGraph agent that coordinates local LLM calls, and one for a Prometheus + Grafana stack monitoring the node itself. The agent container communicates with the LLM via a REST API exposed through a VLAN, keeping the inference traffic isolated from the management network.

The biggest lesson so far has been around resource limits — an unbound agent process can easily OOM a 32 GB host when running multi-step reasoning chains. Implementing cgroup memory limits and request timeouts was essential for stability. Next steps: setting up a proper CI/CD pipeline with GitLab Runner in a privileged container.