A few years back I build an ultra budget workstation desktop. It is a lenovo P300 workstation. It’s based on an old Haswell Xeon V3. It’s no ultra performer. The machine only has DDR3 ram. Doesn’t support ReBar… not particularily useful for any sort of modern gaming, but luckily I’m not a modern gamer :)

I bought the workstation itself for about $60. For the longest time I was running a GTX 960, which I powered using a 2x SATA power connector to a 6 Pin ATX power cord. Very sketchy, very scary. The worst part is that the power supply that lenovo uses is a proprietary, and it powers the accessory devices THROUGH the motherboard. So that full 120w I was pulling was going directly through the motherboard. I have no idea how it ran as well as it did.

Anyhow, It was time for an upgrade. My adventures in self-hosting has me bitten with the vram bug. Looking around my local computer store, I saw an AsRock Intel Arc B580, 12gb of Vram, for only $339. I can swallow that!

I also picked up the cheapest 600w power supply I could find, and it was time to get to work.

I expected that it would be MUCH easier than it was. I don’t have a Molex connector removal tool, so I used some staples to press the tabs down. It took forever to disassemble the 14 pin connector.

I broke out my multimeter, jumped PSO to ground and measured all the pins. My pinout ended up looking like this at first:

 =============
 | 12v | GND |
 | 12v | GND |
 | 12v | GND | 
 |-12v | 5v  |
 | n/a | 5v  |
 | GND | PSO |
 | GND | PSG |
 =============

Looks great, right! WRONG! there’s a problem. Look closely.

That’s right. I didn’t put a standby 5V in! Fixing that, we get:

 =============
 | 12v | GND |
 | 12v | GND |
 | 12v | GND |
 |-12v | 5Vsb|
 | n/a | 5v  |
 | GND | PSO |
 | GND | PSG |
 =============

After doing that, the PC starts and posts! Awesome. Step 1 complete.

I didn’t say it booted though.

So, I pull the arc GPU back out, slap the GTX 960 back in, and start looking for problems. I was running Mint 22, which uses the 5.18 headers, which are relatively old at this point, so I installed mintupdate, and updated my OS to Mint 23.

After installing mint 23, I needed to switch install an HWE kernel. It seems that mint, at least mine, defaulted to GA. I followed this guide

After that, I followed this guide to set up the drivers.

After installing everything. I shut everything down. put the new card in, and boot. PC post beeps, then….nothing.

After a few hours of troubleshooting, I hit a lead. I noticed that when the arc GPU was in the system, the BIOS screen wouldn’t load. It was all garbled and broken. When I first saw it I was scared that I had destroyed the mobo, but thankfully I did not.

As it turns out, ARC cards NEED UEFI. I had CSM turned on. I switched it off, and voila! Everything works great!

I popped gemma 2.5:0.5b in, and gave it a simple “make a hello world in c” prompt. I got around 112 tok/s using the vulkan backend on ollama, which I am pretty happy with!