4 min readJust now
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Kyoto Region Update: Why scale out when you can scale up? A story of father-son bonding, structural stuffed animals, and unconventional GPU mounting.
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Where it all began. Building the first iteration (Ryzen 5 8500G) with my son. Little did we know this modest gaming PC would soon evolve into a headless monster.
1. The Origin: A Father-Son Project It all started with a simple goal: I wanted to build a gaming PC with my son. We went to the electronics store together, picked out the parts, and built it from scratch. It was a fantastic experience to teach him how computers work. At the time, it was a modest machine:
- CPU: Ryzen 5 8500G
- GPU: RTX 4060 Ti
- Case: A generic store-brand case (Dospara)
It was a great start, but as an infrastructure engineer, I couldn’t help but look at that machine when he wasn’t playing games and think… “What a waste of resources.”
2. The Awakening: Seeking Density I decided to dual-boot the machine with Ubuntu and started using it as a web server and for AI transcription tasks. I was immediately shocked. Even the modest Ryzen 5 8500G was significantly faster than the cloud instances I was paying for. That’s when the “Home Lab Virus” hit me. I didn’t just want a PC; I wanted a Monster. In Japan, we have a “Space Tax” — our apartments are small. So, my philosophy became: “Why add more servers when you can make one server do the work of three?”
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The Heart of the Beast. Upgrading to the Ryzen 9 9950X and 128GB of RAM. The massive Noctua NH-D15 G2 cooler dominates the motherboard, promising silence and performance.
I upgraded everything:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (The Beast)
- Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 G2 (Silence is King)
- RAM: 128GB DDR5 (I wish I bought more…)
- Case: Fractal Design Define 7
- Power: Fractal Design Ion+ 2 Platinum 860W
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The Result?
- Ryzen 5 8500G Geekbench: Multi-Core ~7,600
- Ryzen 9 9950X Geekbench: Multi-Core 20,176
It was a 2.6x performance jump in the same physical footprint. This confirmed my theory: High Density > High Scale for home labs.
3. The Problem: The RTX 5080 is Too Big To complete the beast, I bought the new RTX 5080. But I hit a physical wall. The card is massive. I tried a standard vertical mount, but it was a disaster. The GPU choked against the glass panel, and the cables interfered with the massive Noctua CPU cooler. It was hot, loud, and ugly.
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The Failed Experiment. Attempting a standard vertical mount for the RTX 5080. It was too tight — the GPU backplate was practically hugging the CPU cooler, choking the airflow.