Hectic‡
Modernity.
The current rig. Water-cooled, open-air, built around a consumer AM4 platform and a single 3090. The machine that runs Etty ; photographed as a specimen of the room it ended up in.
Dossier‡
Hectic Modernity is the workstation at the centre of the practice ; the machine that runs Etty, renders the lithographs, hosts the vision head training runs, and photographs itself as a specimen of its own room.
Built on a consumer AM4 platform with a single RTX 3090 ; a deliberate choice. The whole thesis of Etty is that a coherent 8B model, running locally on one card, can outperform what isolated-benchmark thinking would predict. Hectic Modernity is the physical argument for that claim. Open-air frame, water-cooled, copper tubing, tempered glass reservoir, a monstera on the shelf above that has learnt the shape of the updrafts from the rads.
The name comes from a half-remembered line in a Le Corbusier footnote about cities built too fast to cool. It fits. The machine runs hot, runs always, and occupies more of the room than its footprint suggests ; through fan hum, through the orange glow of an Edison bulb on the shelf beside it, through the way the plant above it leans very slightly forward.
‡ specification
Parts manifest‡
as built · placeholder| category | part | note |
|---|---|---|
| cpu | AMD Ryzen 9 5950X | 16 cores, Zen 3. The unglamorous answer. Outlasted everything else on the bench. |
| board | ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Hero | X570. Consumer, not workstation. On purpose. |
| gpu | NVIDIA RTX 3090 | 24 GB. Stable under sustained load. The whole Etty stack fits. |
| memory | 64 GB DDR4-3600 | 4 × 16 GB. Enough for training dataloaders and the vector store alongside. |
| storage · boot | 2 TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe | OS + active datasets. |
| storage · work | 2 TB WD Black SN850X NVMe | Model weights, checkpoints, recent video. |
| storage · archive | SSD array · mirrored | Dataset mirrors. Never the only copy. |
| storage · cold | Offsite mirror · encrypted | Quarterly. |
| psu | Seasonic Titanium | Silent under 500 W. Digital telemetry on tap. |
| loop · cpu | EK Quantum · copper | Bare copper, left to patina. |
| loop · gpu | Alphacool Eisblock · acrylic | Bronze mounting plate. |
| loop · rad | 360 mm · push | Noctua NF-A12x25 on intake. |
| loop · pump | EK D5 PWM + tempered glass reservoir | Reservoir is visible. Bubbles are a meditation. |
| loop · fluid | Mayhems X1 Clear · distilled top-up | Drained and refilled every 12 months. |
| chassis | Open-air frame | No panels, no shrouds. Thermal clarity as a principle. |
| monitoring | HWiNFO64 → Grafana dashboard | Temps, RPMs, power. Historical ; not for alerts. |
Build log‡
5 waypoints · placeholder-
2024.09
sourcing ‡
Parts land on the bench one at a time. The shape of the machine begins to be imagined backwards from what's already there.
-
2024.11
frame ‡
Open-air chassis assembled over a weekend. First dry-fit ; everything clears by a hair.
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2025.01
loop ‡
Custom loop bent over three evenings. Two leaks before the first boot; both at the same fitting, both my fault. You learn to listen for a drip before you look.
-
2025.04
first run ‡
Full-power training run. mmproj trains overnight. Rads breathe. Monstera doesn't notice.
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2026.04
ongoing ‡
Hosting Etty at 8B. Loop drained and refilled ; some patina on the copper now. Planned next: fresh thermal paste on the CPU block, a second NVMe mirror.
More plates‡
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