Finally got the whole lab into one rack. DeskPi donated a RackMate T1 (8U, 10-inch) with a 1U shelf and the mini PC shelf to Atlas Autoware, the student nonprofit I run (we build and race 1/10-scale autonomous cars), and it's become the home for everything. Disclosure: the rack and shelves were donated.
What's in it:
- Intel NUC: k3s server (CRI-O). Runs my self-hosted sites and services, primary DNS for the house, and Beszel for monitoring.
- Raspberry Pi 5 in a DeskPi Lite case: Home Assistant, plus AdGuard Home as backup DNS.
- Minisforum X1-255 (Ryzen 7 255, 16 GB): k3s agent and the GPU node. An RTX A4500 (20 GB) hangs off OCuLink through a HOOCCC dock, powered by a SilverStone FX500 Flex ATX PSU. It trains the models for our car. When nothing is queued, Folding@home grabs the GPU at low priority and gets evicted the moment a training job shows up.
- Network: UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra on the wall, jumbo frames (MTU 9000) across the LAN, and Tailscale so I can get in from school.
Things I learned:
- OCuLink on the X1 tops out at PCIe 4.0 x4, about 7 GB/s each way. Training barely notices.
- The X1 has 16 GB and the BIOS gives 2 GB of it to the iGPU, so my biggest dataset exports ran out of system RAM, not VRAM. 32 GB of swap plus kubelet's LimitedSwap fixed it.
- Under sustained all-core load the Ryzen sits around 85 °C, so I cut the CPU folding down to 4 threads.
Next up: the GPU and PSU are sitting beside the rack for now, so I'm moving them inside with a fan in the top U. After that, a second Pi 5 goes into a trackside lap-timing box for the car.
Diagram is the attached image. Happy to answer questions.
Source: r/DeskLab · by /u/Initial-Structure-71