… I was thinking about buying a 96GB DDR5 kit from the local computer store a few weeks ago, but wasn’t sure it was actually worth €700. Checked again now and the exact same product costs €1500. I guess that settles it, 32GB will have to be enough for the next couple of years then.
IIRC their web site used to make it sound like it was a paid product but it was always possible to get it for free. Can’t remember the exact details, perhaps something similar to those “name your price” softwares that have a pre-filled recommended value but it’s also possible to choose €0? I checked what it looks like nowadays and the Pro version does come up first if you go to downloads, and then there’s a free Core version below it.
Had several issues when upgrading to 41, so I only upgraded to 42 a month or two ago in order to give them time to iron out the bugs first…
Still are, but I guess a lot of people don’t know much about them
Filament not sticking to itself sounds pretty unusual… Found this review on youtube. The channel has 6 subscribers and I have no idea if it’s legit or disguised marketing, but all the comments mention similar problems as yours. There’s also this review, with more negative comments. One person says they managed to get good prints by raising the print temp even more, but don’t do that if you have a PTFE lined hotend. I.e. only try higher temps if you know for sure that you have an all metal hotend.
I’m not up to date on hardware, so I’ll refrain from recommending specific components. I went with AMD Ryzen CPU and Nvidia GPU (using closed source driver) last time I upgraded my PC and it usually works fine, though I know many recommend AMD GPUs nowadays for Linux. If €1000 is your total budget, it might be worth considering a second hand GPU. For example a used RTX 3080 goes for around €300 and they are still quite capable, though someone else will have to say if that’s enough for the flight sims.
One thing you might want to look up is if the game uses hardware raytracing, and if that works on Linux. Out of the games I play, World of Warships looks worse for me than what I see on youtube, despite that I have set all graphics settings to max. Maybe it’s possible to fix by configuring Wine/Proton/DXVK etc. I haven’t really looked into it, but just so you’re aware of potential issues.
I used this list for help when choosing a power supply, but I think that becomes more important if you buy a high end GPU.
I use Steam for almost all my gaming, and it makes running (most) Windows games a breeze.
So far that has never happened because I’m not using that much storage :) But I shut it down when I need to turn off the mains electricity, and for powering it on afterwards the fake wall can be lifted off. It’s just the area underneath the desk so the panel might be smaller than it sounds like, and it hangs on some hooks so it’s fairly easy to remove if you know what you’re doing. Painted in the same colour as the wall, and with some some random junk on the floor in front, it blends in quite well though. I think the risk of burglary is fairly low, so it’s primarily to soothe my own paranoia.
I mounted mine on the wall under a desk in a room with no other electronics, and then put up a fake wall in front of the server. It can draw in air from the sides, and exhaust upwards behind the desk. But the only real solution is offsite backup, which will also protect against fire and other disasters.
Maybe something is wrong with the script generating these test prints, if you don’t have any similar problems with normal prints?
In addition to the blobs in the middle of the circles, I think it looks overextruded/blobby every time it changes direction. E.g. if you look at the -20 sample, it looks generally underextruded as one would expect. Though it’s also blobby around the edges, where the lines make a U-turn. Since the printer usually slows down at turns (unless your acceleration is set insanely high) this could be an indication that you’re exceeding your hotends melting capacity, i.e. either temp is too low or speed is too high, so it would be interesting to know what you calibrated those values to. I don’t think this is usually associated with random blobbing in the middle of the print, but could be worth checking just in case.
If you have a PTFE lined hotend, this kind of blobbing can also be caused by bowden gap IIRC. Might be easier to provide suggestions and ideas if you added some information about what printer you have, what filament it is, and what your other slicer settings are.
If you specify a budget then people might be able to give some recommendations, if you like.
As for aesthetics, Fractal Design offer a few cases which look really nice, if you like the Scandinavian design style. The overview shows all cases with glass or mesh sides, but there’s usually an option to get an opaque door if you don’t want LEDs from the electronics shining through
My friends are currently throwing a tantrum because I won’t “just enable Secure Boot and run Windows” to play Battlefield 6 with them. But I’ve never felt that I must play a specific game, so the few ones who are incompatible (usually due to bad anti-cheats) have been easy to ignore. There are plenty of good games I can play on Linux.
Offline updates is one of the things that annoyed me most back when I was using Windows, and somehow they’ve managed to make it even worse in Fedora. Luckily you can turn it off in F41 by going to the “Software Update” section in system settings, and then changing “Apply system updates” to “Immediately”. Haven’t upgraded to 42 yet but I hope the setting is still there.
I’ve got a MSI MAG Tomahawk wifi which has had a lot of issues, but nothing related to Linux
Can’t help but think about this old XKCD from 2010.
Paper levelling is not an exact method, you might need to manually adjust the Z offset depending on how the first layer looks. It’s also something you generally don’t need to do if you have a probe like crtouch, as it will be used to ensure that the nozzle is at a consistent distance from the bed everywhere, and the Z offset will decide how big that distance should be. Just be careful when adjusting the Z offset so you don’t end up ramming the nozzle into the bed, make small adjustments. If you put a lamp behind the printer you can visually check if the nozzle touches the bed, e.g. if you manually move the nozzle to 0.2mm height after adjusting Z offset, can be good to do a manual check before starting a full print.
Unfortunately your photos are too blurry to give feedback, but if you want to you could try this: Print only the first layer for something simple and stop the print. Get a couple of strong lamps and put them next to your printer. Move the camera as close to the print as it can focus, could be around 20cm for a phone camera. Steady the camera against something solid, for example a stack of books.
If you want to keep trying to level on your own, perhaps this infographic could help. SuperSlicer has a built in calibration wizard which might also be useful.
And some general questions which might help troubleshooting your issue:
Products targeted towards businesses have always been unreasonably more expensive than those targeted towards consumers. It sucks for us AI hobbyists that Nvidia are stingy with VRAM on consumer cards, but I don’t find it surprising.
Personally I only have a single RTX 3090, but I know a lot of people online who are stacking multiple consumer cards to run AI. Buying used 3090s and putting them in a mining rig is probably still the best value for money if you need a large amount of VRAM.
How much VRAM do you actually need btw?
Would be interesting to see how it compares to a 3d printed M10 (or equivalent diameter) screw+nut
new technique enables inorganic composite glass printed at low temperatures
The ones you linked look like they were printing at high temp.
I just wanted to test if it was viable to run larger MoE LLMs on CPU, e.g. Qwen3-next-80B-A3B… Even if I got acceptable generation speeds I’d probably get bored with it after a few hours, as with other local models. Had I got it for €700 it was pretty low value for money anyway, since my current RAM is enough for everything else I use the computer for. On the positive side, I can put that money towards a Steam Frame instead.