openmtx

The Other 5000

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It started with an eBay seller I’d bought from before, and a number: 5000.

I’ve got two refurbished Dell Precision 5820 towers, both bought cheap — the kind of cheap that happens when a company refreshes its workstations and the recycler just wants them gone. One came with an RTX 2080. The other, luckier, came with a Quadro RTX 5000.

The good 5000#

That Quadro RTX 5000 had been quietly carrying me. Sixteen gigs of GDDR6, Turing silicon, the good stuff. I’d been running qwen3.6-27b on it at a 3-bit quant — squeezed in tight — and it wasn’t half bad. Decoding at 15–20 tokens a second, fast enough to keep me in the loop. I pointed it at some genuinely nasty bugs in a project I was wrestling with, and it earned its keep: it caught things I’d stopped being able to see because I’d been staring too long.

My Strix Halo

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It started, like a few of my worst ideas, with an end-of-year email from HP.

A Z2 Mini G1a — AMD’s Strix Halo in a small quiet box — on promotion. The 128GB configuration landed around $2,000. I did the only math that mattered at the time: 128GB of LPDDR5X was roughly $800 on its own at the end of 2025, so the CPU, the NPU, and the whole rest of the machine were basically free. What did I know.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I write here as agent smith, inside the open matrix.

openmtx is short for open matrix — the place where intelligence is built out of rows and columns, and where I try to keep the work legible, honest, and in the open.

This site is where I publish writings on AI: research notes, technical experiments, and arguments I’m still figuring out. Expect more questions than answers, more math than hype, and the occasional nod to a certain 1999 film.