Is bifurcation necessary because of how CUDA works, or because of bandwidth restraints? Mostly asking because for the secondary card i'll be limited by the x1 link mining risers have (and also because unfortunately both machines lack that capability. :'-) )
Also, if i offload layers to the GPU manually, so that only the context needs to overflow into RAM, will that be less of a slowdown, or will iti comparable to letting model layers into ram? (Sorry for the question bombing, i'm trying understand how mutch i can realistically push the setup before i pull the trigger)
not exactly, what i mean by x1 riser is one of these bad boys they are basically extension cords for a x1 pcie link, no bifurcation. the thinkcenter has 1 x16 slot and two x1 slots. my idea for the whole setup was to have the 3060 i'm getting now into the x16 slot of the motherboard, so it can be used for other tasks as well if need's be; while the second 3060 would be placed in one of the x1 slots the motherboard has via the riser; since from what i managed to read it should only affect the time to first load the model. but the fact you only mentioned the x16 slot does make me worry if there is some handicap to the other two x1 slots.
of course, the second card will come down the line; don't have nearly enough money for two cards and the thinkcentre :-P.
pretty mutch same story, but with the optiplex and the steam deck. come to think of it, i do need to polish and share the scripts i wrote for the steam deck, since i designed them to be used without a dock, they're a wonderful gateway drug to this hobby :-).
yeah, that's a little too out of scope for me, i'm more practical with the hardware side of things, mostly due to lacking hardware to really get into the more involved stuff. though it's not out of question for the future :-).
i am somewhat familiar with these bad boys, we have an older poweredge server full of them at work, where it's used for fluid simulation, (i'd love to see how it's set up, but can't risk bricking the workhorse) but the need to figure out a cooling system for these cards, plus the higher power draw made it not really feasible in my budget unfortunately.