Firstly AMD and NVidia both have a range of cards with different power levels. Getting a card with 8G that uses the 75W available from the PCIe slot should be possible.

A card that is setup for ML isn’t necessarily going to work well for desktop use. I currently have a NVIDIA card in my workstation setup for ML and it gives 0.2fps on games. I installed the NVIDIA card because the AMD card died and decided to play with ML on it.

I think the best thing to do is to use a separate PC for ML.

7430 is a nice system. I’ve done a lot with 7400/7410/7420 systems and some of my friends use them daily for programming.

Sure 16G is a restriction in some ways and some compilers take so much ram that make -j10 will fail on 16G but it’s still pretty decent.

What OS are you using? Linux works nicely on 16G, Windows is usable but not so good.

https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/12/22/samsung-8k-tv/ https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/11/25/edid-and-my-8k-tv/ As a final note on this issue, it seems that “8k TVs” sold in Australia don’t actually do 8k, just scaled up 4k at best. So I now have a few devices that can allegedly output 8K but no way of knowing for sure if they can actually do so.

The last times I’ve bought ThinkPad motherboards they were under $100…

There’s really no difference between running Linux on desktop and laptop systems. As you have done it in a desktop the laptop will really be no big deal for you.

Sometimes drivers aren’t quite as good and maybe battery life won’t be as great. But laptop batteries last for ages nowadays so even a small reduction won’t hurt for most uses.

I’ve run a fleet of Linux laptops when doing corporate IT department work and run more than a few for myself and helped out friends. Generally everything works well enough.

There’s no real difference between different brands of laptops that matters to distributions. In most cases there’s not even a difference between desktops and laptops that matters to distribution choice.

ThinkPads have always been well supported by Linux and older laptops are even better for support as there’s no issue of hardware newer than drivers.

Thanks for the advice, I installed the Debian package “read-edid” and used the get-edid program from it to get the EDID from the monitor. Then I installed the “wxedid” package to display it graphically because the parse-edid program from read-edid didn’t work well. According to wxedid there’s a seletion of 38402160 modes and some 40962160 modes. So it seems that the EDID is the problem.

DSC is designed to be visually lossless not mathematically lossless - you could say the same about JPEG. There are many reports about text being rendered badly with DSC.

MAXSUN Intel Arc B580 Milestone 12G Graphics Card (MS-ARC-B580-MILESTONE-12G

The above is the cheapest card from my local store that has DisplayPort 2.1 (the rest have 1.4). It’s $469 compared to $199 for a RX 6400 or RX 6500. I can probably find somewhere cheaper to buy these things but I’m working on the assumption that the ratios of prices are going to be about the same.

From the Wikipedia page it looks like DSC is needed to do 8K@60Hz on DisplayPort 1.4. I think that is bad for text though.

That card has DisplayPort 1.4 which means that if HDMI doesn’t work then it’s limited to HBR3 which gives 24bpp@31Hz, which is barely adequate.

Also how do you set the bpp rates? The DisplayPort wikipedia page says that 24bpp and 30bpp are supported, but how do I even know which is in use?

The TV has built in NetFlix and YouTube so I don’t have much need for playing video from Linux. Currently YouTube is the only source of 8K video that I’m aware of.

I know it’s low end, I just don’t want to spend much money. It seems likely that one way or another I’ll find some problem with whatever card I get and want to replace it in a couple of years so I don’t want to spend much.

The card is documented as having HDMI 2.1.

I replaced the Power Backplane board J14R7 0J14R7 and it’s been running for just over 24 hours. As it was an intermittent fault I don’t count this as proof that it is fixed (I’ll wait another couple of days to be sure) but previously it never lasted 8 hours so it seems most likely.

The old Power Backplane had no puffy capacitors, no scorch marks, and no other indication that it was faulty. I also used all the same cables so it doesn’t look like a cable issue.

Thanks for your comment it helped give me confidence to spend the money on a new board. The other option I had considered was to just buy another system that would take the CPUs I bought.

The PSUs have lights on in the normal manner, they both have green lights when the machine is unresponsive. The power is probably OK, it works well enough for many other systems. The PSUs are configured in a redundant configuration, I’ve tried it running each of the PSUs separately and running both. Tried running both from a Y cable and from separate cables. I’ve tried switching the PSUs between bays. None of this changes it. But all on the same circuit.

There’s nothing in the iDRAC logs related to it or at the same times.

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll try it on a different circuit but I have to put it back together again.