Assuming you aren’t CTO of Surescripts, I think you might have lost the plot on what Homelab is to most of us. We have financial, power, noise, and cooling constraints. We may be interested in multiple-GPU setups, but probably not racks full of $10K enterprise GPUs and enclosed cases for them. Although I would be interested in what 45HL could offer in a GPU-centric rather than storage-centric case, for multiple GPUs in a homelab the competition is probably more like an open frame rack;
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Digital Garden,
Lol, I’m not a CTO, and there’s a good chance that you probably have more computers than I do.
But before I respond to the meat of your question, I just want to say that I’ve read many of your posts in the Homelabs forums and you always offer really great feedback and very thoughtful questions to people in these forums that is well beyond most. So with that let me respond then.
Multiple Markets in Play
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You are absolutely right to say that most Homelabers aren’t looking to run the very largest use cases and/or may or may not have the best GPUs (be they consumer or enterprise).
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But on the other hand, 45 Homelabs could still cover a lot of their costs by catering products to a minority % of their userbase who do have bigger use cases.
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This would be ideal actually because it could complement the fact that the majority of the typical Homelabs users that you are speaking for probably won’t buy more than 1 - 3 or so cases per customer. Whereas someone with larger use cases might buy more units and/or a smaller # of more $$$ units than a typical Homelabs user might.
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So I think what we’re really getting at here is that 45 Homelabs has the potential to address multiple markets, not just the pure Homelabs use cases.
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And this is actually the exact point I tried to address above by discussing the broadening of the market here beyond just Homelabbers to adjacent spaces like: AI, higher end Graphics, Scientific, etc.
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Finally, while I understand where you’re coming from, I’m not sure that advocating for the Homelabs Team to make cases designed to fit a mix of consumer, prosumer, and Enterprise use cases is really “losing the script” per se, because what I’m advocating for is actually already done all over the industry.
– Let’s take GPUs for example. Both Nvidia and AMD sell the vast majority of their GPUs (in terms of units) to consumer via the GeForce line at lower prices (theoretically anyway, let’s not get into a discussion on MSRP
) and then they also charge very high prices to sell their latest, most cutting edge, professional cards to Pros via the RTX Pro lineup. And everybody is fine with that. We wouldn’t say that Nvidia / AMD lost the script there, because Nvidia / AMD (theoretically, anyway) charge consumers less for GPUs than they would have to charge if they didn’t have the pro markets buying smaller numbers of very expensive GPUs to help subsidize all of that R&D.
Mining Rigs
- Yeah, I’ve looked at some of the open air Mining Rig cases and they have lots of pros.
- But they also have lots of cons starting with the fact that they have almost zero protection around a lot of critical components. All it takes is an accidentally spilled drink or a bumped object to really ruin your day if you aren’t running these cases in a very isolated area.
- Now a rackmount-able, Closed Mining Rig Case could be an option. But at this point, we’re probably really just talking about a Rackmount case like any other. Regardless of that, I included one possible option that fits this description from Tupavco below.
HL30
- While the majority of your feedback was on the GPU Case, I don’t want to forget the HL30 here either.
- There has been a fair amount of demand expressed in these forums for the HL30 and the HL30 is not going to be bought by a Homelabber with 4 Hard Drives lying around. So I’m in pretty good company there. The HL30 isn’t a one off ask from 1 person or anything like that.
- Or to just put this in real terms, I just did a quick search and I found that the HL30 has been asked for at least 9 times across 9 different postings in this forum.
- So look, I’m open to whatever terminology we want to use here. We can call it larger use cases. We can call it Enterprise use cases, etc. The simple reality is that a significant minority, a still very material % of people in this forum do want to run larger setups. It’s not as if I’m a total outlier here.
One (Use) Case To Rule Them All
- Finally, I think it’s important to recognize that every case Homelabs designs doesn’t need to speak to every single one of us.
- On one hand, I bought the HL15 and I’m mostly happy with it.
- Whereas on the other hand, none of their other cases (the HL4, the HL8, the Home Client, the Home Workstation) really met my needs.
- But those cases did work well for others and that’s great.
- To me, the more cases the Homelabs Team sells, the more new cases they will be making for all of us down the road, and that’s great news for everyone in this forum.
All of that aside, thank you for all of your many contributions to this forum. We are all better off for you being a part of this community.
Cheers!
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…also, here’s another reference case that the 45 Homelabs Team could use as inspiration if they wanted to build a Multi-GPU case.
Tupavco TP1846 GPU Mining Rig Case
- This case is no longer sold, but the rough bones of it are there.
- Even if the 45 Homelabs Team just married the basic 2 chamber design of this case with what they already have with the “The Beast” in say a 6U form factor, you’d already have a way better case than what Tupavco made.
- Tupavco TP1846
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