Bench, rack, and instruments

Workshop overview: workbench with pegboard bin storage, parts organizers, and an open-frame hardware test bench — The workshop: main bench, pegboard small-parts storage, and the test-bench corner.

Electronics and repair bench

The main bench is set up for board-level work — a programmable bench power supply, soldering and hot-air rework stations, an oscilloscope, and wall-mounted parts organizers stocked with the small components that vintage machines consume: capacitors, voltage regulators, fuses, and connector hardware. An open-frame test bench beside it holds whatever motherboard is currently under diagnosis, so boards can be brought up and probed outside a case.

Electronics workbench with parts organizers, an Apple IIe awaiting repair, and an open-frame hardware test bench — The repair corner: an Apple IIe on the bench, parts organizers in the window, and the open-frame test bench on the right.

Compute

Modern compute lives in a mobile rack: a virtualization host with hot-swap storage on a UPS, plus the custom-built machines used for the performance experiments written up here — including Galactus, the EPYC inference server. The ongoing measurements from these machines are published in the LLM Performance Engineering Notebook.

Galactus: LLM inference server build with four AMD Radeon Pro V620 GPUs and an EPYC 7713 in a Jonsbo N5 chassis — Galactus — EPYC 7713, 2 TB DDR4, and four Radeon Pro V620s in a Jonsbo N5 chassis.

Staging and burn-in

A second bench stages machines that are between arrival and restoration — network switches and a KVM for bringing several systems up at once, with recently finished machines shelved below.

Staging workbench with a Power Macintosh G3 all-in-one, laptops, rack-mount network switches, and Power Mac G5 towers below — The staging bench: a Power Macintosh G3 all-in-one under test, with Power Mac G5s queued underneath.