I recently upgraded my mini PC, and it’s worthy of a post. Don't worry there's a TL;DR at the bottom. 😁
There’s not much information on the web about the PELADN "Silver Wing" HA-04 mini PC. I was able to find two reliable sites that had some minimal information [1] [2] and a YouTube video that put to test the performance and cooling (which is now restricted for some reason) [3].
However, that was enough to convince me to purchase the mini PC. I was already looking for a mini PC with the AMD 7840HS chipset, primarily for the 780M iGPU to do some light gaming. It also had an unlocked, stock BIOS and was one of the cheapest mini PCs with the 7840HS CPU. This meant I could crank up the TDP of the processor to 54W to get the best performance.
I put Nobara Linux on it, loaded up Steam and it worked great. But in the fall of 2023, I discovered Generative AI.
Now, there are a lot of takes on generative AI and I’m not here to argue any of them. I find generative AI technically interesting and play around with many of the open weight and open source models. I occasionally use them for work.
Well the past year I've been chasing open-weight AI performance improvements, downloading dozens of models and hundreds of GB of data. At first I was working with 7-10 billion parameter models, which when quantized, fit within 16GB of RAM. After 6 months or so, it became apparent that those models just weren't "smart" enough. To fit larger models into RAM, I upgraded my memory in a cost-effective way by adding another 16GB of RAM. I was now able to run models in the 14-22 billion parameter range. Again, I was able to see the limits of models in that range so I tested a highly quantized 70 billion parameter model. It was barely able to fit in memory, (and way slow) but acted as the proof of concept that these models were feasible on this system.
I did a ton of research -- I wasn't sure this would work, as the system does not explicitly state it -- But I bit the bullet and decided to purchase (an expensive) 96GB Crucial RAM kit. For the TL;DR, the systems supports the 96GB of memory just fine.
Now I need to figure out of one of the USB-C ports supports the full 40Gbps speeds
TL;DR
The PELADN "Silver Wing" HA-04 mini PC supports 96GB of RAM. I'm using a 2x48GB Crucial DDR5 RAM kit.