As technologies change and adapt, we’re often left with seemingly useless junk that has nowhere to go. Certainly anyone still sitting on a pile of floppy disks feels this way sometimes, but odds are anyone who owns a mining ASIC or an NFT can attest to that as well. The trillions of dollars flowing into GPU-based data centers will likely become the next victim of this trend, so if you want to capitalize on the losses of some venture capitalist you’ll want to figure out a way to get GPUs meant for a server into your desktop doing useful work.

Of course, calling these devices GPUs is a bit of a stretch compared to the Radeon and GeForce cards many of us are used to using for gaming. These don’t even have a PCIe slot or video output, after all. But, as [Oscar] notes, the VRAM and GPU cores are very real and can still do useful work. An adapter board is able to mate a Tesla V100 SXM2 16 GB GPU to a standard PCIe slot, which solves the first problem, but the major downside from there is that the cooling fan for this unit was literally deafeningly loud. At 82 dB it was about as loud as a lawnmower, which is fine in a server rack but not great in a bedroom. [Oscar] found a way to tamp down the fan speed, making it usable in a home.

Without video output, the utility of these cards mainly comes from adding VRAM and compute for tasks that benefit from parallel computing. Using tensor splitting, [Oscar] is running a local LLM with this card alongside his RTX 4080, providing 32 GB of VRAM on his NixOS system. With his benchmarking tests, the LLM sports impressive stats for a self-hosted model, ranking somewhere around Claude Sonnet 4.6. What’s even more impressive is that this is all done for around £200, and with the rate the various LLM companies are ratcheting up pricing could pay itself back very quickly. If trading off performance for cost is acceptable, though, it’s possible to run local models on much less powerful hardware as well.

Microsoft's 2026 lifecycle schedule includes major support deadlines for Windows, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Azure services.

The post Microsoft’s 2026 Support Deadlines Explained: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on TechRepublic.

Microsoft's 2026 lifecycle schedule includes major support deadlines for Windows, Office, SQL Server, SharePoint, and Azure services.

The post Microsoft’s 2026 Support Deadlines Explained: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on TechRepublic.

You almost certainly don’t have an application for the sort of accurate timekeeping that’s made possible by this enhanced version of [Cristiano Monteiro]’s satellite-backed time server. By his own admission, the vast majority of users will be more than happy to have their system’s time synchronized by the traditional Network Time Protocol (NTP). But if you’re really chasing those last few microseconds, that’s where the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) comes in.

With NTP, you can get within 10 milliseconds or so of your upstream time source — but PTP is accurate down to nanoseconds. Unless you’re performing some kind of scientific research, running a robotic assembly line, or perhaps doing high-speed financial trading, there’s no reason for this level of accuracy. In fact, PTP is such a niche technology that until the release of the ESP32-P4, [Cristiano] couldn’t even find an affordable enough chip that supported it.

Hardware-level support for PTP is important as there’s no way to achieve this level of accuracy with software alone, the capability needs to be baked into the Ethernet controller. As you might expect, it takes a highly accurate time source to make the most of PTP, and that’s where the navigation-grade Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver comes in. All told the cost of the build is unsurprisingly higher than that of its predecessor, but [Cristiano] says it’s still a couple zeros shy of what a commercial offering would run.

As with his original time server from 2021, [Cristiano] made sure this build was as friendly as possible for hackers and makers. We especially like the 3D printed case designed in OpenSCAD, and his insistence that the gadget have a front panel with blinking status LEDs. Again, the vast majority of us don’t need our clocks to be accurate down to the nanosecond…but it’s nice to know we have the option.