poppy the training box, part 1: the beginnings :: Giles' blog
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poppy the training box, part 1: the beginnings
Posted on 9 July 2026
in
poppy the training box,
Gadgets
For a while I've been planning to put together a separate machine for local LLM<br>training. Until now, I've been using my desktop PC, perry. I have an RTX 3090<br>installed, and can get useful training runs done (most recently,<br>a 163M-parameter GPT-2 small style LLM in JAX),<br>but there are a couple of problems.
perry is my daily driver. If he's doing a training run, then everything is<br>just a little bit sluggish as CPU and GPU alike are busy.
Although I don't play games often, it's annoying to have the option ruled out<br>for days at a time.
While the GPU is busy with a training run, I can't do other experiments in parallel<br>-- for example, to scope out what the next step might be.
And relatedly to all of those: the two-day limit to the training runs I've been doing is something I set<br>because that's the maximum amount of time I'm willing to have perry tied up. It<br>would be really interesting to try longer training runs!
I also have longer-term plans; a multi-GPU box would be interesting to put together --<br>not just to have more power locally, but so that I could test larger-scale cloud<br>multi-GPU<br>training runs before starting to pay for expensive machines. US$15.92 an hour to rent a machine<br>isn't a lot of money, but it adds up, especially if you're spending it while debugging<br>parallelism issues.
And finally, I've always been interested in putting together a custom water-cooling<br>loop in a PC. I've been building my own machines since 1995 or so, but never got round<br>to that side of things. It sounds fun!
But despite all of those future plans, this is a fairly normal machine-building post -- how I repurposed an old PC,<br>plugged in a second-hand RTX 3090 from eBay, tested it all, accidentally trained an LLM<br>for 11 days, and almost...