A Home Depot box, two AMD graphics cards — one of them a 2020 server card nobody officially supports — and 48 GB of VRAM running AI models at reading speed, without CUDA, without a case, and without apology. These are the field logs: benchmarks, war stories, and receipts.
Software is easy. Buy more hardware.
Qwen3.8-27B at 30.5–32.2 tok/s decode on a Radeon Pro V620, 92% MTP draft acceptance, 192K context — plus the four traps that cost a month, the 60-dollar duct that dropped junction temps 30 degrees, and the machine's self-portrait, drawn by itself on AMD.
Distro ROCm 7.2.4 vs kernel 7.1.9: the hipRegisterTracerCallback crash, and the side-by-side TheRock recipe that means an update breaks one environment variable instead of the box.
The tear, the cardboard shelf, the silicone bead, and why the fire strategy for a cardboard computer is software with a trip history.