[Worklog] The Beast Slayer

[hiigaran]

Hard to say. It all depends on a lot of factors. When my roommates are home. When I have the energy to do something on the rare days I'm alone in the apartment. If I even get a US flight to order more cards.

[hiigaran]

Okay, so the two risers that I ordered a while back have arrived. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's going to be a simple matter of plugging them in and giving them a whirl, as I haven't been able to get the card on the riser to work, or even be detected by the operating system, for that matter.

So, firstly, the good news: None of my hardware blew up, and all attempts to start the system resulted in a successful POST.

Now, the configuration I used was two cards plugged directly in to their x16 slots, which I had intended to use as references for PPD output, and one card connected to an x16 slot via the x1 riser. I know all the x16 slots work, as they usually hold four cards under normal circumstances. I don't know about the x8 slots, but I see no reason for them to be defective.

So, the current issue seems to be that the riser card is not being detected. X Server shows two cards out of three in the test setup configuration, which are the cards connected directly to the x16 slots. I've also noticed that under this hardware setup, F@H does not work. FAHControl shows a blank screen and a 'connecting' message, and the temperatures on the cards being detected are indicative of an idle state.

Another thing I noticed when booting up on the test setup was that it froze when the desktop started loading, but only on the first boot. My guess is that F@H tried to run, and somehow crashed the system, then never tried folding until I put the hardware back to its original state, at which point it resumed folding like nothing happened.

Either way, I tried plugging the riser into a x8 slot. Never made it past the loading screen for the OS.

Not sure what to do now. Waiting on some replies on other forums to see if there's some way I can get this running.

[hiigaran]

What's this? An update? About damn time!

So if anyone noticed, we dropped a bit with PPD recently, because I had to turn my folding rigs off for about three weeks. My mother flew in and stayed for that long, and like any normal human being, could not stand the sound of science.

...Science apparently sounds like multiple GPU fans running at 100%

But it did give me an opportunity to actually continue working on this project. Since I had to turn them off anyway, I wouldn't have felt guilty about the downtime. Or at least, not as much. So it was time to build a larger case for my hardware!



I still had quite a bit of acrylic left over from when I was building the PoH, and it was just enough for me to cut out four boards and get the absolute basics, along with a fifth board made from the old Beast Slayer motherboard mounting plate. After fiddling around in Blender to get a simple visual plan of the case, I decided on cutting out the following:

2x 50cm * 75cm
2x 50cm * 37cm
1x 77cm * 37cm

The first two boards were the motherboard and PSU plates. Just like the previous acrylic construction, the motherboards will be up top, and the power supplies underneath. The next two boards were the left and right panels. These attach to the edges of the two plates. The motherboard plate is secured to these and is held up by the left and right panels. The final board is the front panel, covering the entire front, including two additional centimeters to cover the edges of the left and right panels.

All of these panels are held together with M4 screws. A lot of effort went in to ensuring that I drilled the holes for these screws straight, as the acrylic is only 10mm thick. An M4 screw would be almost half of that thickness. If they were off and got close to either surface of the boards the screws would be securing, it could crack from the weight of what it supports. That would be an expensive mistake!



After drilling and tapping the holes for the standoffs, I got the hardware mounted and fired up. Happy to see everything still works.

You might have noticed that I also placed the hard drives on the motherboard plate this time, rather than beside the PSUs, and that is because those drives won't be there for long. I ordered a couple of M.2 drives that I will use instead. Not that I need the faster drives, but they are tiny, and since they mount flat to the motherboards themselves, I can free up four cables that would otherwise go towards two hard drives. Fewer cables means less clutter, and a cleaner look.

But I'm back now to having a cable clusterfuck, regardless. Since I wanted to get my system back up and running as soon as possible, I didn't bother with the cable management.

Here you can also see the acrylic board that was cannibalised from the other mounting plate. This board is filled with holes that were for standoffs, plus two larger holes that were for securing the original board to the PSU plate in the first design. Naturally, this is only a temporary board, and I'll have a new one cut out once I get more acrylic.

The motherboard plate will need a little extra support however, as it bends a little with all that weight. Nothing too bad, but I'd rather get it fixed sooner, rather than later. For now, I just placed some extra material between the PSUs and the plate. Once I get a rear panel made, it will support the rest with three or four M4s.

While the drives are being shipped, I'll need to create a cable to better position the power switches. Ideally, I'd like to mount the switches to the bottom half of the front panel, and add HDD indicator LEDs for each system. Since that means I would need 8 cables in total, I might consider cutting a length of CAT5, so that the cables stay together.



I had this 10cm * 3cm section cut out, so that the cables can be fed through. This better positioning allows me to have more wiggle room with the cables, which were only just long enough in the previous design. Eventually, the hole will be sealed and airtight, but for now, they will remain loose, since no additional cable management has been made for this case yet.

[hiigaran]

M.2 drives have arrived. Seems to be a slight issue though. Inspecting both drives, one has four chips on it, while the other has just one. These are supposed to be identical 64 gig drives, so that's left me a little confused. Someone forgot to solder them on the second drive? Or is it possible that the second drive is using a chip that's four times the capacity of the ones used on the first drive?

Guess the only way to find out is to get them hooked up, but I'm going to hold off on that for a bit. Perhaps in a week or so.

[Ponnnny]

When I will come home, I do photo too)

[hiigaran]

Been a while since I updated here. Mostly been bitching and whining about stuff not working right in other threads, and on IRC.

Especially on IRC.

So, a quick recap:

1: That oddity with the M.2 drives having different numbers of chips on them was not an issue. They're both working normally. Guess it was just a product variation and the chips had different storage densities.

2: The one we are all aware of was the issue getting things installed to the drives. No matter how many different distros I tried, I just couldn't get things working they way I needed them to be. That is, able to fold, and able to manually set GPU fan speeds on boot. I never did get that solved, so instead, I cloned the hard drives to the M.2 drives and left it at that. Some other hiccups along the way, but everything is working as intended.

3: Now that the hard drives are no longer needed, I've removed them. Four cables were removed as a result, and I'm happy with seeing fewer cables.

4: At present, both rigs are running Mint 18.2, kernel 4.15.7, and nVidia 384. Version 390 does not work, so anyone else thinking of updating drivers should avoid 390 on Linux. Not sure if it would work on Windows, though. Ubuntu 18.04 is set to release in a few months, so at some point, I'll probably plug one of the hard drives back in and try a fresh install. If it works, I'll repeat the process on the M.2, after a backup of everything.

[hiigaran]

Boom! Out go the lights! PSU exploded on one of my rigs.

Needless to say, I'm not too happy right now. Have to figure out how to RMA this thing, since it has a 10 year warranty on it, but I'm 12 000 Km away from where it was purchased.

[tiwake]

Thats why I put battery backups on every electronic device.

[hiigaran]

I don't think a UPS is going to help me with a dead PSU...

[hiigaran]

It lives! Finally completed the RMA and had the part shipped out.

Turns out EVGA thinks that Dubai is in Saudi Arabia. Now, I don't exactly have the high ground with knowledge of geography, but Dubai is a pretty well-known city. You'd think they'd get its country right! Good thing I sorted that issue out before they shipped!

Just finished with all the pending updates, so I'm going to let the system run as normal now. I hear that Ubuntu 18.04 will be released fully at the end of April. There's a decent chance that one of the features found in the previous release caused the issues I've had with reinstalling the operating system, so I will try it out when the time comes.

[PoNyePiC]

It lives! Finally completed the RMA and had the part shipped out.

Turns out EVGA thinks that Dubai is in Saudi Arabia. Now, I don't exactly have the high ground with knowledge of geography, but Dubai is a pretty well-known city. You'd think they'd get its country right! Good thing I sorted that issue out before they shipped!

Just finished with all the pending updates, so I'm going to let the system run as normal now. I hear that Ubuntu 18.04 will be released fully at the end of April. There's a decent chance that one of the features found in the previous release caused the issues I've had with reinstalling the operating system, so I will try it out when the time comes.

Without googling it, I assume the country would be UAE?  I used to watch all those TV shows about Dubai being built from the ground up. Don’t they have the palm tree man-made islands?  And of course the worlds tallest skyscraper. Basically, the complete opposite of where I live (in a treehouse in the woods)  

[BreakPoint]

How are the temperatures for the sandwiched 1080s? I just go a third 1080 blower style, and I was about to resume folding, but I was shocked by the temp of my middle air cooled card. I thought my dual 140mm side intake fans would provide enough air for the sandwiched cards when I eventually got 4 of them. I can move the cards so that there is one slot between each, but the I would not be able to add a fourth card.

Do you really just run them at or above 80c all day? Someone told me (without a source that a 1080 To has almost no drop in PPD going from 4x to 1x PCIe Lanes on Linux. I'll have to see if one of my mining co-workers will lend me a riser to test this. If it's true, maybe an ASRock H110 BTC motherboard with 13 PCIe x1 slots is the way to go.

[hiigaran]

My temps are reported as 69, 82, 64 and 70 degrees, from first to fourth card. All run at 100% fan speed. The fourth card at 70 degrees is the only one with an unrestricted airflow.

Not quite sure why the second card runs so hot, compared to the others, especially when it is an identical make and model to the third. Both have cards to either side of them as well.

[hiigaran]

Happy to report that both systems are running 18.04 now. Loving the new release. There's a new option in the installer to do a minimal install, which only includes the desktop environment, Firefox, and some basic system utilities. Cuts out the unnecessary junk. After that, the commands needed were simple and setting up F@H as well as fan controls were very straightforward.

I loved it so much that I got rid of Windows on my main rig and installed 18.04 there as well. Hopefully there should be some increases to my PPD as well.