[Worklog] Return Of The Wall-Mounted Monstrosity: LiL PWNY

[PoNyePiC]

I do try not to recommend rubbish ;)

I can't believe there are literally ZERO other good options.  It's really a gamble when getting any of the other ones, even the brand name ones that come from Lian Li or Thermaltake.  So it looks like I can do seven GPUs instead of the eight I originally would have liked.  It will definitely look better without the added molex PSU cables.  How did you learn about the 3M ones?  I never saw them until I directly searched for them.  I have yet to see a single complaint about them from the several forums I looked at, price aside.  For one riser, they ultimately charged me $102   I could save a hundred bucks if I were to get the rest all at once with a bulk price and combined shipping.  


Thanks to BestPony for saving the wall project

[hiigaran]

I remember coming across some ridiculously expensive products that would have been a perfect solution, had they been cheaper. The device would both split PCI-e, and essentially give you an unlimited distance between mobo and card, by using fiber optics. Of course, the added latency of converting electrical to optical, then back, then repeating the process for the return transmission would cause a bit of a performance hit, but it was a very interesting product.

[PoNyePiC]

I remember coming across some ridiculously expensive products that would have been a perfect solution, had they been cheaper. The device would both split PCI-e, and essentially give you an unlimited distance between mobo and card, by using fiber optics. Of course, the added latency of converting electrical to optical, then back, then repeating the process for the return transmission would cause a bit of a performance hit, but it was a very interesting product.

Latency during gaming might suck, but do you think it would be an issue as far as Folding goes?  Like how satellite internet would suck for online gaming but not as much for web browsing.  

[hiigaran]

I think latency would still be a bigger issue than that. If one bit of data needs to wait for another bit of data before it can be sent, it might still cause significant performance loss. Similar to RAM timings, I guess.

[PoNyePiC]

I was hoping to have the riser yesterday, but they held it at the post office.  I guess thats how you know they are good risers   So I will restart the wall mounted computer after work tonight.  Since I have to move the motherboard up a bit to use risers, I will be moving the whole project to the other side of the window from where it is now.  The 3m PCIe risers look excellent and come incredibly safely packaged.  Too bad it smells toxic, but a small price to pay for working risers 


I other news, I'm not sure if I will have all matching GPUs since the red one just went up by $65 on Newegg.  I will try to keep a decent design pattern with whichever ones I do get.

[PoNyePiC]

I had this project on the back burner for awhile now.  Once I realized how restricted I would be with the old AMD system, I decided to save up a few  thousand dollars to build a new base system.  I was trying to throw all my money at GPUs, but without a strong system to run them, it was moot 


So fast-forward to this week, I decided to hit it off with a shopping spree.  I got a (sexy) new motherboard, RAM and an M.2 stick.  I will be running a 12-core CPU until I get the 18-core one next month or so.  I was planning to get the 10-core Intel 6950X but ended up settling with the 18-core Xeon 2699v3.  I didn't want an ES Xeon, so I needed to save up a bit more.  The new parts should start arriving this week, hopefully all of them 


For the motherboard, I wanted an X99 motherboard with at least seven PCIe 3.0 x16 slots.  And all slots had to be functional when all filled.  Originally I was aiming for a dual Xeon board for the 80 PCIe lanes, but found that I could possibly use a single xeon with 40 lanes.  The Asus X99e-WS has two PLX swithches which should effectively give me 64 lanes (16x,8x,8x,8x,8x,8x,8x).  The cards should run fine at the PCIe 3.0 8x speeds. 




In lieu of better cable management, I went for another M.2 SSD.  They attach directly to the motherboard with no data or power cables.  And even better, they run off PCIe instead of SATA which makes them almost 5 times faster than the fastest SSDs.  I looked at several and went with another Samsung 960 EVO 256GB, the smallest one they seem to make.  I would have been happy with a 128GB one if they had it and it were cheaper.

 

I was going to get budget RAM because it's not really too important nowadays.  However, I wanted this base system to last a number of GPU generations, so I splurged.  I noticed all the budget DDR4 RAM has CAS latencies or 15 or 16.  I found some CAS 10 from Corsair which took the price up about 60%.  Corsair Dominator Platinum, four sticks of 4GB.  I only got one set of four for now, which gives me a quad channel setup.  In the near future I will grab four more sticks and have 32GB.  I don't see needing over 32GB anytime soon   (anything over 8GB is literally overkill)





Stay tuned for the new rebuild this coming week.  I might start early since the motherboard is expected to arrive today 

All new GPUs will be the GTX 1080s instead of the 1070s I was planning on using.  I thought about getting one 1080ti for gaming purposes, but we'll see how that goes.  I might just do all 1080s because I could still SLI two of them while hanging from the GPU rack.  Also, again for cable management purposes, I only want one power cable for each card.  The 1070s and 1080s come with one-plug options, while the 1080ti requires two 




P.S. ~ I no longer give a shit about my power bill.  I find that helps a bit 

[Talifan9]

....where the fuck do you people get your MONEY from!?
ARGHASKDJLK:S DK:LSA:LAS

[PoNyePiC]

....where the fuck do you people get your MONEY from!?
ARGHASKDJLK:S DK:LSA:LAS

Well, seeing as I am a pizza delivery guy, I go door to door and people hand me money 

I make about $150 a night, 5 nights a week, delivering pizzas.  Then I get paid $30 every single day to delivery newspapers for two hours.  It's decent moolah without a college degree 

And people always ask why the pizza guys here have nicer cars than they do   one driver at my store drives a Corvette.  And my next car is a loaded Chevy Bolt later this  @ $45k.  

TL:DR ~ try looking for a paper route.  If you drive, a rural route is usually over $400 per month per hour.

[Talifan9]

I make about $150 a night, 5 nights a week, delivering pizzas.

I am in the wrong line of work.

[hiigaran]

(anything over 8GB is literally overkill)

You've clearly never run any BOINC units from TheSkyNet. One WU hit 7 gigs!

TL:DR ~ try looking for a paper route.  If you drive, a rural route is usually over $400 per month per hour.

And bring a charger and run WiGLE while you're doing it!

[tiwake]

In lieu of better cable management, I went for another M.2 SSD.  They attach directly to the motherboard with no data or power cables.  And even better, they run off PCIe instead of SATA which makes them almost 5 times faster than the fastest SSDs.  I looked at several and went with another Samsung 960 EVO 256GB, the smallest one they seem to make.  I would have been happy with a 128GB one if they had it and it were cheaper.

Just to let you know, any SSD that is bootable, that runs off of the PCIe bus directly, has its own SATA RAID controller on board. The ones that don't are used pretty much exclusively for servers as a cache for typically rather large RAID arrays. I very much doubt its 5x faster than the fastest SSD.

Also, why not wait for AMD's naples server stuff to come out? 128 PCIe lanes is perfect for what we want. It is supposed to launch sometime between now and two months from now. If I had to guess, sometime in june or july.

[PoNyePiC]

In lieu of better cable management, I went for another M.2 SSD.  They attach directly to the motherboard with no data or power cables.  And even better, they run off PCIe instead of SATA which makes them almost 5 times faster than the fastest SSDs.

I very much doubt its 5x faster than the fastest SSD.

M.2 is easily 5x faster than SSDs, assuming we are talking about SSDs running off SATA III.  If I were to use a PCIe adapter, that would consume one of my oh so valuable PCIe slots.  SATA III drives don't exceed 500MB/s too far

[PoNyePiC]

These M.2 sticks are rather deceiving in the images:


And then you get them, and they're no bigger than a stick of gum.  I had forgotten just how adorable they are
   


And if you ever need a bookmark, they work great:

[PoNyePiC]

The RAM has arrived 



Pretty sure these ones can be used as weapons...

So the build begins between now and Monday.  If I do endup getting the 6950X instead, I would probably get higher speed memory.  The Xeon only supports 2133mhz.

[PoNyePiC]

Ran into a few issues switching the AIO from AM3+ to 2011-3 socket.  Apparently Corsair changed bolt sizes when they updated their h100i cooler.  Got it all worked out and jizzed a bead of Arctic Silver on the 12-core Xeon.  

I normally don't test hardware before a build, but I decided to try it before the rather involved installation.  I call it ClusterFuck 2.0    

P.S.~ Installed Linux.  Got pissed off (again  ) Installed Windows 10.