Good morning — it's Sunday, November 8. Maxsun's SK-PTLNAS packs a 16-core laptop chip, five NVMe slots and room for a dozen hard drives on one NAS board. From the bench: P-H3-Image, an 8-megapixel image model in 21 GB of VRAM — license catch included. Drops: a 16-channel board with no PCIe slots. Don't keep us a secret: forward this email to a fellow home labber, or share the web version.
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Maxsun has published specs for the SK-PTLNAS, a NAS board built around a soldered Intel Core Ultra 9 386H: 16 Panther Lake cores at 25W base power, scaling to 80W. Two SO-DIMM slots take 128GB of DDR5-7200; networking is 10GbE (Marvell AQC113) plus 2.5GbE.
Storage is the point. Five M.2 NVMe slots handle the fast tier, and three SFF-8643 Mini SAS connectors each fan out to four SATA drives — a dozen hard drives, no HBA card, the PCIe 5.0 slot left free. Four Xe3 cores handle transcoding.
The catches: no price yet, a launch due this month, a CPU soldered for life, and a maker centered on China. If the price lands sensibly, this is the DIY answer to all-flash NAS boxes: your case, your drives, your operating system.
P-H3-Image, out this week from Pruna AI, squeezes the MiniMax-H3 video model into a still-image model: 8-megapixel text-to-image in 8 steps, no classifier-free guidance, and edits composing up to 8 input images. A prompt upsampler turns a one-line request into the prompt it renders best — strongest, Pruna says, at photorealism and editorial looks.
The bf16 set is datacenter-sized — 100 GB of weights, 83 GB of VRAM at 8 MP, prompt as written, about 9 seconds an image on one B200 (vendor). The ComfyUI files are the homelab story: a 20 GB download peaking at 21 GB of VRAM, rendering 2048 x 2048 in 6.3 seconds on a 48 GB L40S against 19 for bf16 (vendor). Every number here is Pruna's own; no independent run is published yet.
Now the catch, in full: the MiniMax H3 Community License excludes the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Korea without a separate MiniMax license. The card admits hands can break and small text turns unreliable. Setup notes: native in ComfyUI, no custom nodes — nightly builds today, the next stable release to follow. Difficulty: light setup.
Sixteen memory channels, zero PCIe slots. At OCP Summit 2026 ASRock Rack showed the DMRD16-2L+, a single-socket Diamond Rapids board with 16 DIMM slots and 16 MCIO connectors carrying 128 PCIe Gen6 lanes — every lane on a cable, as Gen6 signaling pushes PCIe onto cables. Shown, not launched — no price, no date. Watch the connector — it reaches smaller hardware next.
Inkling 2 Small is out — on Tinker only, for now. Released November 5: 594B total, 17B active, image input, up to 1M context on the card. Today it runs only on Tinker, the lab's platform; full weights follow next week under Apache 2.0, after safety testing. On its own tables (vendor), DeepSeek V4.1 Flash still leads most coding rows — CellCog's read has the tables.
GitHub find: Dossier puts your job search on your own server. AienTech/dossier (4,815 stars, AGPL-3.0, 20 releases since its October 3 launch) keeps one career profile and drafts a tailored resume and cover letter per posting from its facts alone — gaps shown, never invented. It runs in Docker on about 2 GB of memory, driving a local model via Ollama or LM Studio — the profile never leaves your hardware.
Sunday, the hottest afternoon of the month, and your AI node starts thermal-throttling mid-batch: intake temperatures are climbing, every fan is at full speed, and the photo backup is queued behind the job. The rack is hotter than it has ever run.
Your call:
A. Pause the batch, then find and fix the airflow fault — a failed exhaust fan, a clogged filter — before restarting anything
B. Cap the node's power limit and let it finish slowly while you order a replacement fan
C. Silence the temperature alarm and let it run — throttling is the chip protecting itself
100 Hero Points for the right call. Your score is on the outcome page, ready to share.
A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.
— Freeman Dyson
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How we source: facts come from primary sources opened for this issue. Benchmarks are labeled (vendor), (independent), or (community), never blended. Deal prices are checked the day they run. This is not buying advice.
Corrections: none today.
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