This is the build log for Symbiotic Flora, the workstation that succeeds Hectic Modernity. It is being written in public and in progress ; so the prose is thin in places and the parts list has pending rows that haven't shipped yet. I'd rather publish a note that's true and partial than a finished one that's late.
The name is chosen on purpose. Hectic Modernity is the rig that currently runs Etty; it has an Edison bulb, a copper loop, and too many cables. Symbiotic Flora is meant to be the quieter sibling ; a machine whose presence in the room is nourishing rather than declarative. Bronze instead of copper. Less chrome, more oxide. A loop that reads like a plant, not a plumbing diagram.
Why now‡
Etty's current ceiling is not training ; training happens on rented compute, as it should. The ceiling is serving. A 70B dense checkpoint at Q6_K with a long vision context doesn't fit on a single RTX 3090, and running out of VRAM mid-conversation is the kind of breakage that breaks the illusion of a companion. Symbiotic Flora exists so there can be a second Etty ; an order of magnitude larger, dense (not MoE), persona-merged against the same lineage ; that never has to apologise for the machine underneath it.
The failures look like this: a conversation that's been running for forty minutes, a vision trace that's accumulated eight screenshots, and suddenly the model starts hedging everything ; answers go shorter, specificity collapses, the warmth goes out of it. Then the log shows CUDA OOM and a graceful degrade to a smaller quant. Which works, in the strict sense that tokens still come out, but the person on the other end of the conversation feels it. They don't say your GPU ran out of memory; they say why did she get weird. That's the problem. The answer to why did she get weird should never be RAM.
Current parts list‡
Still moving. Status column marks what's on the shelf versus what I'm still sourcing.
what's in the box right now
A case skeleton, the motherboard still in its pink foam, two SSDs, a water block, and a printed copy of this post on the bench as a to-do list. The bronze tubing arrived yesterday and is genuinely beautiful in person. A picture for later.
Design constraints‡
Three, in order of how often they lose arguments:
1. The loop has to look like plumbing, not like decoration. Straight runs, 45° bends where needed, no spiral theatrics. The aesthetic reference is a Victorian distillery, not a gaming chair. Bronze patinas over time; that's the point. I want the machine to look older in two years, not tireder.
2. It has to be quiet enough to share a room with a conversation. Measuring against Hectic Modernity's idle profile (28 dB at the desk). Target: 24 dB. The RTX PRO 6000 is the interesting problem ; a 600W card wants to be loud, and convincing it not to be is more about loop design than fan curves.
3. No RGB. None. Zero. An Edison bulb on the shelf is plenty of light. A machine that announces itself is a machine I can't think next to.
A workstation should be a quiet co-conspirator, not an audience.‡
Open questions‡
Things I don't yet know the answer to, written down here so I can look back at them honestly:
Two loops or one? A single loop simplifies plumbing and lets me run one reservoir. Two loops let me temperature-isolate the CPU from the thermally loud primary GPU, which matters when the GPU is pinned at inference for hours. I'm leaning toward two ; the visual rhythm of a smaller loop inside a larger one appeals ; but it's twenty per cent more cable management and I'm not sure it earns that.
NixOS or Arch? Arch is what Hectic Modernity runs and I can rebuild it from memory. NixOS is the honest answer for a machine I want to keep reproducible for five years. Leaning Nix. If you have strong feelings about running CUDA + Triton + llama.cpp on Nix, I want to hear them.
Fan profile for inference bursts. Sustained compute is a different shape from gaming; I'd rather lose 5% throughput for a 10 dB quieter fan curve. TBD after the first week of actual serving.
on patina
I've been collecting bronze reference samples for three weeks now ; a brass door handle from a stripped-out east London pub, the fittings on an old drafting desk my uncle threw out, a 1970s brass desk lamp that somebody down the road was giving away. None of these are pristine. All of them look better than they did new. The tubing will start clean and gold and over eighteen months will move toward a deeper, warmer olive. I'm not going to force it. The room does the work.
Next update‡
When the motherboard is unwrapped and the first dry-fit happens, I'll add photographs and a short set of measurements. Probably six weeks out, but I've been wrong about timelines on hardware builds before ; I'll be wrong again.
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; Wxël, at the bench, a Thursday afternoon. ‡
Revision history‡
This page is a live draft. A short log of substantive changes, not typos: