Author Topic: New PC build p0rn photos.  (Read 6245 times)

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Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #25 on: April 14, 2022, 09:38:50 am »
You find me a good spec'ed motherboard which DOESNT have RGB.

Where it was an option, I went with the non-RGB option.  You'd be surprised how limiting that can be though.  If you start out by searching for "No god damn unicorn vomit", you find yourself browsing the corporate thin client components.
I have yet to find a server board with RGB, granted you'll probably have to buy used to get a reasonable price. It most likely would also include a CPU or two (still top notch performance if not too old) and support for more RAM than you're likely to use anytime soon. The cooling design isn't going to get skimped on either and if you're lucky, it would have a high ambient option (e.g. Dell Fresh Air) that improves things even more.
Quote
Cooling and fans, and their proper configuration, alignment, flows and control is somewhere I spend money because I know it's value in using auto-overclocking components that if you keep them cool, the run faster.  Add £200 to the price of the graphics card itself just for cooling, will usually net you another 20-25% over all performance.  Same for the CPU.
The best fans available don't even have RGB options, just loads of power with high quality bearings and variable speed control.
Sounds like you missed the fun stuff.  The big change requiring the tower (and mines a MIDI Tower) is the amount of power these things consume and thus the heat they produce.  320W for just the video card.  Another 120-140W for the CPU.  Another 100W for the mainboard.  That's a LOT of heat to get rid of.  "Why get rid?", all modern components will slow themselves down to remain within thermal limits and stability.  So your lovely 4.6Ghz processor in your latest Z workstation with it's rubbish, "to a budget" cooler, rapidly drops it's clocks to 3.8Ghz as it can't handle the heat output at 4.6Ghz.  You might as well have bought the 3.8Ghz beside it for £300 cheaper.
I doubt a proper *workstation* is going to compromise much on thermal design.

Server != Workstation != Gaming Desktop.

They all have different requirements and workloads.  The former two are typically tuned for large parallel loads.  The later for heavy single threaded load and real time graphical framerate production.  A server might run a TitanX or A5000 card to run 64 parallel encoder and FX threads on the GPU rendering a 4K video.  A task which can be predicted, planned, optimized and then executed.  A gaming PC hands it a stream of objects, light sources etc. etc. etc. in realtime expecting a frame back in under 20ms and sustain that for hours at 100 frames per second.

When benchmarked, high end servers and workstations tend to out perform gaming PCs on pure parallel compute tasks, especially when they have multiple CPUs and GPUs.  Video editing, timeline scrubbing, rendering and CAD, CAM, aero/hydro etc. etc. simulations run better.  But when it comes to running games on server and workstation hardware, they struggle.  They tend to aim for efficiency and parallelism rather than balls to the wall 100% caned to get those last 10 FPS in live rendering.  So they struggle and underperform.

That's not to say you can't pimp and mod a server board to play games.  But it wouldn't be cheap.  (Linus Tech Tips did build a machine with 8 GPUs in it on a server board, ran 8 VMs, assigned each a GPU and got 8 gamers to play simultaneously on it.  I believe they then tried to show how hard it was to cool with ridiculous aircon units and duct fans etc. etc.  Sure they were playable, but not exactly out performing a standalone rig... and the cost was eye watering).

Turning a rack server into a gaming rig would be very much like taking a Ford Transit and completely refitting it with a Jaquar XJ220 engine and creating a race car out of it.

To extend that further.
Server = Truck.
Workstation = Van
Desktop = Hatchback
Gaming PC = Sports car

Sure the van will carry more stuff and do the whole job faster, but it's just not as much fun.
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Offline Berni

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #26 on: April 14, 2022, 10:36:35 am »
It is hard to avoid RGB lightning on PC parts these days.

If you are after building a fast desktop PC from brand new parts you will get the best bang per buck using parts for gaming PCs. The economy of scale does it's thing here.

Sure you can get even more performance by going into servers and serious workstations but the price of those quickly starts going trough the roof while they are very specialized machines that are overly optimized for a single kind of workload. That dual socket 64 core server board with 1TB of RAM might be awesome for ruining a database server but it is not going to be that great of a desktop machine. Its expensive, its loud, its power hungy, yet a modern midrange laptop will beat it at single threaded performance.

If you have a specialized need go ahead and build a mean powerful machine for the job. Even then just using a server board is not a magic bullet, servers are specialized for certain tasks so you need the right kind of server board and server CPU.

However for the kind of stuff people do at home on a PC it turns out that "gaming PCs" are the most performant PC you can get on a reasonable budget. These computers have a decent core count CPU that also has top notch single threaded performance, a decedent amount of RAM running at high clock speeds, a fast SSD(>3GB/s on NVME), lots of cooling that is optimized to be quiet, powerful hardware accelerated graphics (that also include video encode/decode acceleration and compute), extra slots for expansion cards.. etc All in a machine that costs around 1000 bucks brand new(Well maybe not right now with the component shortage shitshow).

It is all you need for compiling code, CAD software, content creation etc... and if its your thing they can also run games afterwards. Very few things out there it couldn't do.

If you want ECC then go ahead and just buy a board/CPU that supports ECC RAM sticks and a Quadro card.

And if you find it fun to mess with fancy and obscure server hardware, go ahead and hoard together some machines from the used market and do some neat stuff with them. IT can be a hobby too.
 

Online themadhippy

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #27 on: April 14, 2022, 11:59:00 am »
After many years and ££££ i gave up trying to maintain a gaming pc and just bought a games console.No more chasing the latest graphics card or trying to tweak the last bit of performance whilst putting up with the noise of multiple fans,now the computer sits,almost silently doing everything it needs to.My last console cost less than the new motherboard/proccesor /power supply /case upgrade loop i would need to complete to play the latest games i wanted at a decent speed.  An added advantage is the abundance  of second hand games available for the console.
 

Offline free_electron

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #28 on: April 14, 2022, 01:54:04 pm »
It is hard to avoid RGB lightning on PC parts these days.
Really ? i must be looking in the wrong places. then. Supermicro motherboards , Smart Modular Tech and Micron technologies RAM , Samsung SSD's. no RGB in sight.
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Offline Berni

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #29 on: April 14, 2022, 03:17:20 pm »
After many years and ££££ i gave up trying to maintain a gaming pc and just bought a games console.No more chasing the latest graphics card or trying to tweak the last bit of performance whilst putting up with the noise of multiple fans,now the computer sits,almost silently doing everything it needs to.My last console cost less than the new motherboard/proccesor /power supply /case upgrade loop i would need to complete to play the latest games i wanted at a decent speed.  An added advantage is the abundance  of second hand games available for the console.

Doesn't mean you have to use a gaming PC for actual gaming if it is not your thing.

Just that due to the economy of scale these are the most powerful PCs that you can get for a good price. For example i seen a lot of mechanical engineers carry around gaming laptops (The ones with the ugly gamery design that screams gaming computer from a mile away). They also don't like the looks of it, but the reason they have one is that those laptops are powerful while still being relatively cheep. They let them quickly open very big 3D CAD models and manipulate them smoothly.

For me personally i never been into gaming consoles. I would have a decent PC in any case, so i just stuck a decent GPU in there for doing a bit of gaming here and there. My current GTX 1070 cost me 180€ about 3 years ago, i even downclock it since its plenty fast. The cheapest new PS5 is 400€ so over twice as much (while it has no optical drive so no used games). PC games can be had on sales for 10 bucks a piece, or if i want to avoid giving the developer/publisher any money (i reserve this for the asshole ones with shitty business practices like EA, Ubisoft..etc) then i pirate it. Buying and installing a game on Steam is just as easy as on a console, just press install and then run.

It is hard to avoid RGB lightning on PC parts these days.
Really ? i must be looking in the wrong places. then. Supermicro motherboards , Smart Modular Tech and Micron technologies RAM , Samsung SSD's. no RGB in sight.
Well i should have said more the gamer-y visual designs.

Don't think i have seen any SSD with RGB yet. More that most of the cost effective high performance PC parts have gamer marketing plastered all over it. For example the WD Black SN750 M.2 SSD i recently bought has a all black design with funky fonts all over it, even says "High performance Gaming NVMe SSD" on the box. It was simply the cheapest high performance 1TB SSD that can do sustained writes in the GB/s ranges all day long without eating up the write endurance any time soon. Most of the motherboards these days have some decorative gamery designs to make them look "cool". All the cheep high performance CPU coolers have gamery designs plastered all over. The high quality PSUs have all black cables because it looks cooler...etc

I would actually prefer it if PC components looked more like they did in the Pentium 3 days of bland green boards. But i just buy whatever performs well for a good price. Sure server stuff might be even better built and sometimes offer a little bit more performance but i am not willing to pay 2x or 3x or 4x the normal price for that luxury. My desktop PC is not a mission critical control center for a nuclear plant. If it dies then il just fix it. My PCs have always been reliable so far.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2022, 03:19:52 pm by Berni »
 

Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #30 on: April 14, 2022, 04:59:16 pm »
It is hard to avoid RGB lightning on PC parts these days.
Really ? i must be looking in the wrong places. then. Supermicro motherboards , Smart Modular Tech and Micron technologies RAM , Samsung SSD's. no RGB in sight.

I'm sorry but if you are buying your hardware purely because it DOESNT have RGB, you need to have a sit down and a talk with yourself, as that's just as bad as buying hardware BECAUSE it has RGB.

You can turn RGB off or just not connected it but you'll need to spend money to make a bad board good.

EDIT:
I looked at SuperMicro's gaming motherboards.  No RGB, but seriously underspeced as well and ... not cheap at ~£500.  It has half the capability in everything buy Mv.2 drives and 10Gbe.  4 fan headers supporting only 1 fan each.  No variable fan speed for DC fans.  Only 2 V3Gen2 ports, one 1 internal USB 3 header.  4 SATA ports, not 8.  and so on and so on.

Oh and they are in bed with Intel.  They don't list a single AMD board.  They also bullshit you that the MV.2 slots have to use Intel MV.2 drives.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2022, 05:20:39 pm by paulca »
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Online themadhippy

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #31 on: April 14, 2022, 05:48:35 pm »
Quote
My current GTX 1070 cost me 180€ about 3 years ago, i even downclock it since its plenty fast.
But thats one component,my 6 year old machine id need at least a new motherboard and cpu if i wanted to play the latest releases at  the speed the console can ,and now microsoft own activision how long before win 11 becomes a requirement
Quote
PC games can be had on sales for 10 bucks a piece,
yea theirs cheap pc stuff available ,but here at least,its much easier to find second hand versions of the recent releases for consoles than it is for pc
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Steam
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Offline DavidAlfa

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #32 on: April 14, 2022, 05:49:38 pm »
The RGB CRAP has f*** computing.
Brands know that adding "RGB" to the box will sell a lot better than anythign else, they priorize that.
Thanks, Youtube/Twitch kids.
I wanted a simple CMOS reset switch and a led display for diagnosis, not even f** that under $400!

Before, you could get a decent mobo, good VRM, decent cooling, plenty of I/O expansions, dual bios, useful switches, diagnostic leds, and it wasn't crazy expensive, perhabs $150-$200.

An Asus MAXIMUS V EXTREME was the most crazy expensive shit for $400.
Not caused by the inflation at all, but to the semiconductor crysis and these stupid hyped kids buying anythything at any means, now for $200 you barely get an empty box.
Brands now know they can sell whatever at any price, as long the streaming crap keeps working.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2022, 05:53:31 pm by DavidAlfa »
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Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #33 on: April 14, 2022, 08:15:34 pm »
True, but things are changing. 

Nvidia are, for example, shipping LHR cards since last year or so.  (Low Hash Rate, not great for mining until they are hacked).  But also filling out the low end, like 3060, 3050.  These don't disappear to miners and so have lesser value.  So stocks have risen, supply is starting to meet demand.  Prices are holding RRP + 20% right now, but falling.

Also, deliberately devaluing scalped cards stockpiled by releasing at least 1 revision to the reference spec.  to improve stability.  So Rev 1 cards are devalued as soon as supply kicks back in, best hope scalpers don't have stock when that crashes. 

I didn't want to wait as I had promised a few weeks before the virus crap hit that I'd give my then current PC (2700X:1070Ti:16Gb) to my brother, also a gamer, who is disabled and has not been able to afford to upgrade his PC since 2016!  Next time I looked, stock = 0, prices = 250%.  I waited and waited and waited and while I still went in at 20% over MSRP for most things ... waiting till January sales 2023 would probably see MSRP and MSRP-20% on many things.

What did 1070Ti to 3080 get me?

The games that were "fine" with the 1070Ti with VSync on at 60Hz are still fine, it's just the video card doesn't make as much heat so the fans stay low or off entirely.

The games that were struggling, like DCS World were like night and day.  Going from barely 60fps  lagging down to 25-30fps frequently... was suddenly a solid 80 FPS dropping to 60fps on occasion.  That is AFTER going from "VR - LOW" to normal "HIGH" detail spec.  Smoother and far more detailed, far further into the distance.

Now it's time to upgrade the VR headset from a 2x1080p to something like the Reverb G2 at 2x2200p (ish?).
« Last Edit: April 14, 2022, 08:19:32 pm by paulca »
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Offline DavidAlfa

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #34 on: April 14, 2022, 11:52:02 pm »
Well, that 1070 was pretty old if you're a frequent gamer.
I had a GTX970 which I had bought in 2014-2015, used, for 220€, was a great performer.
At the start of 2021 I was recovering from a really hard sugery, barely could walk, on top of that the lockdown came in, so everyone was bored at home.
Me and my small brother started gaming again, found a KFA2 RTX2060 offer for 299€ and couldn't resist, buying two.
Then I auctioned my GTX970 on eBay, bid starting from 1€... someone paid 140€ for it. After 6 years. Crazy.

The boost clocks were not great, so I moded the shunt resistors and flashed a Asus Strix BIOS.
The damn thing never sees the power limit (50-60% at max load), made a proper fan profile in Afterburner, the boost clocks are 2010MHz 24/7.
 
So yeah, no RGB, no fancy, no shiny crap,  but a RTX2060 for 160€  :-DD
« Last Edit: April 14, 2022, 11:59:49 pm by DavidAlfa »
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Offline NiHaoMike

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #35 on: April 15, 2022, 12:13:11 am »
Server != Workstation != Gaming Desktop.

They all have different requirements and workloads.  The former two are typically tuned for large parallel loads.  The later for heavy single threaded load and real time graphical framerate production.  A server might run a TitanX or A5000 card to run 64 parallel encoder and FX threads on the GPU rendering a 4K video.  A task which can be predicted, planned, optimized and then executed.  A gaming PC hands it a stream of objects, light sources etc. etc. etc. in realtime expecting a frame back in under 20ms and sustain that for hours at 100 frames per second.

When benchmarked, high end servers and workstations tend to out perform gaming PCs on pure parallel compute tasks, especially when they have multiple CPUs and GPUs.  Video editing, timeline scrubbing, rendering and CAD, CAM, aero/hydro etc. etc. simulations run better.  But when it comes to running games on server and workstation hardware, they struggle.  They tend to aim for efficiency and parallelism rather than balls to the wall 100% caned to get those last 10 FPS in live rendering.  So they struggle and underperform.

That's not to say you can't pimp and mod a server board to play games.  But it wouldn't be cheap.  (Linus Tech Tips did build a machine with 8 GPUs in it on a server board, ran 8 VMs, assigned each a GPU and got 8 gamers to play simultaneously on it.  I believe they then tried to show how hard it was to cool with ridiculous aircon units and duct fans etc. etc.  Sure they were playable, but not exactly out performing a standalone rig... and the cost was eye watering).

Turning a rack server into a gaming rig would be very much like taking a Ford Transit and completely refitting it with a Jaquar XJ220 engine and creating a race car out of it.

To extend that further.
Server = Truck.
Workstation = Van
Desktop = Hatchback
Gaming PC = Sports car

Sure the van will carry more stuff and do the whole job faster, but it's just not as much fun.
What hardware do professional flight simulators run on? I doubt they're just putting gaming PCs into those. My guess would be rack servers with GPUs and some sort of high speed backplane like Infiniband.

Back when I just graduated from high school, I was shopping for a laptop to use for college. I narrowed down the choices to 2 Dells - a gaming model as well as a workstation. The only real differences between the two were that IEEE1394 was standard on the workstation but optional on the gaming and the gaming had a whole rainbow of color choices while the workstation is "any color you like as long as it's flat black". I went with the workstation since I used IEEE1394 as a cheap high speed LAN back then.
After many years and ££££ i gave up trying to maintain a gaming pc and just bought a games console.No more chasing the latest graphics card or trying to tweak the last bit of performance whilst putting up with the noise of multiple fans,now the computer sits,almost silently doing everything it needs to.My last console cost less than the new motherboard/proccesor /power supply /case upgrade loop i would need to complete to play the latest games i wanted at a decent speed.  An added advantage is the abundance  of second hand games available for the console.
And a level of user-hostile "security" that would make an iPad look like an open platform. For that matter, might M1 Macs become the new "console"?
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Offline Berni

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #36 on: April 15, 2022, 06:04:33 am »
Yep my desktop machine is pretty old.

It is a i7 4790K with 32GB of DDR3 with that GTX 1070. So this is a 8 year old CPU at this point. But thanks to AMD being out of the picture and Intel doing nothing because of it that CPU is not that horribly slow by todays standards(just the 4 cores is a bit few these days). It does the job fine. So unless you really want to be on the bleeding edge you don't actually need to upgrade a PC all that often (Amusing you buy a decently fast PC to begin with).

As for gaming. I am not that serious of a gamer, just something i do here or there when i don't feel like doing work. I don't tend to play the latest AAA tiles right out of the gate, if they are very demanding i am fine with dropping graphics settings lower, my screens are only 1080p anyway, i don't have VR..etc so that GTX 1070 is still serving me well.

I also don't really care for physical copies of games. They are more of a hassle to buy, have to keep them somewhere and get the disc when you want to play it. My i7 machine never even had a optical drive (the DVD drive on IDE from the old PC could not work with the new motherboard, so i just didn't put one in and never missed it). So i like Steam where i can just buy a game in seconds with a single click, download it and play it minutes later. There is no draconian DRM with it. I can install Steam on multiple PCs and just install any game with a click. Once authenticated the games also work in offline mode without internet. Sure my game collection would be gone if Steam goes out of business, but that is pretty unlikely to happen any time soon.

What hardware do professional flight simulators run on? I doubt they're just putting gaming PCs into those. My guess would be rack servers with GPUs and some sort of high speed backplane like Infiniband.

You can build a FAA certified flight training simulator using X-Plane 11. It just takes special licenses for all of it, as well as certified hardware for the controls. As usual in aviation the hard part is the certification and being certified does not actually mean its particularly good, it just means it was signed off by a bunch of people as being good enough.

So you basically just need a stack of "gaming PCs" to run it. But by the time you spend the money on just the software licenses you are already in the 6 digit figures, so you might as well also spend some extra money on more enterprise grade offerings from NVidia like the Quadro GPUs and a proper server board. But it is still just a PC.

The more fancy Nvidia enterprise solutions where they pack >10kW of GPUs in a single server case, those tend to be specialized for compute and so don't have a video output connector. Those instead get used for doing raytrace rendering of CGI movies, AI training, weather simulations etc...
 

Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #37 on: April 15, 2022, 09:57:45 am »
I think the solution integrators like Dell, HP, et. al.  That sell high end hardware that isn't for gaming, tend to target their markets towards corporates.  Johny and his gaming PC going off line because he remounted the radiator upside down is not a big deal.  Having a customer have to pay £200 a hour for a technician in a far away country to physcially pull the server and repair it, while it has down time = big deal.

Corporates are willing to pay way over premium if the system comes with on-site support and warranty.  Corporates want to know they can have Dell/HP/whomever at their datacentre the next morning with an identical replacement.  So when you spent £3500 on a basic 1U rack server based on "commodity hardware" you are really only getting about £2000 worth of kit and are paying the £1500 premium for that "Enterprise grade" warranty and support...  which a gamer who only has 1 to look after and it sits right beside him isn't interested in.  It's just not worth paying for support when you built it yourself!  Just replace the parts yourself.

I remember doing computer hardware specs for companies several times.  We basically broke it down into categories desktop/office PC/Laptops, General workstation, Specialist workstation, Server. But all that really meant was the general workstation had lots of RAM, a bigger CPU and 2 monitors (see software engineer or electronics designer).  The specialist workstations where those that came with titles like "CAD" or "CAM", they tended to have a defacto application which you just fed the best specced parts to meet its needs.  There was no consultation.  The customer just ordered X desktops, Y workstations, Z cad or cam machines.  They trusted we specced them fine, they trusted we would support them, etc. etc.  They didn't even ask about specs, they just assumed we knew what we were doing and to be honest, they were running 1995 hardware in 2005 (Compact Presario servers etc).  It wasn't going to be hard to impress them.  The desktops ended up being MicroATX boards with onboard video and 1G RAM, in Windows XP days.  I scooped myself a nice Presario server for my network, including SCSI RAID array (4Gb, LOL) and a 4Gb tape drive.... which ended up in the bin not that long after.

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Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #38 on: April 15, 2022, 10:14:42 am »
Server side, things scale immensely these days.

In work we are migrating from one data-warehouse solution  (IBM) to another (Apache Hadoop, Cloudera stack).

I ran a query the other day, nothing special, just count the number of rows in the primary partitions.  Shrug.  The number of rows as impressive, but no where near as impressive as how long the query took.  It gave me my answer in 5 minutes.  What made my eyes go wide however was the total CPU time for the query was 4 days.

I pulled up the cluster stats and the number of cores was over 4,000, total available memory around 16 Terrabyte and disk space measured in Petabytes.  That was just our quota/segment of the cluster and SAN.

An individual edge node, proxy, agent box ... basically a standard server ...  has a spec featuring 128 Cores and 1Tb or RAM.  They share a highspeed RAID NAS redundant pair of 100Tb for "local" storage.

Mostly they are integrated rack / blade systems.  Big storage array and power supplies at the bottom, then blade after blade after blade of processor/memory units.

Behind all this is layers and layers upon layers of virtualisation.  So you could assign all those resources to one "machine" or you could carve it up statically or dynamically into a dozen lesser dev or application servers for example.

I think they have moved a lot of actual "host nodes" into the AWS and Azure clouds and seemlessly integrate them into the virtualisation/logical layouts.

It's pretty insane, tier 1 enterprise stuff.  My view into that stuff is quiet limited, I don't even know the full extent of that data cluster for production.  The UAT/QA system alone is massive and for production there are 2 exact copies of the entire cluster as redundant hot/hot load sharing and resilience.
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Online tom66

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #39 on: April 15, 2022, 10:18:45 am »
Well, I'll go against the sentiment, nice build :)

And who cares about the RGB lights - it's your PC, you can make it look like however you want.  Personally I chose components with no built in lighting (exception being the stock AMD cooler) because my PC sits out of direct view of my desk.  But if it was on show I could see myself putting some lights in there.
 
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Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #40 on: April 15, 2022, 12:50:27 pm »
Well, the fun I'm having with the cooling system and testing, tweaking, testing to see what the limitations are and just how hot it will run or how cool it will run, for each component and how they interact.

Using:
* Prime95 for synthetic CPU loading (of different flavours and levels of torture)
* Furmark @3440x1440 for synthetic GPU stress loading
* MSI Afterburner for detailed metrics and graphs (stupid name, great program, previously known as RivaTuner until it was bought by MSI)
* MSI Afterburner for GPU clocks, voltage, limiters tuning.
* Argus Monitor for fan/pump control, more detailed metrics and graphs
* 3DMark "Time Spy" benchmark for short term performance 'scores' and comparisons with other peoples scores, not for competition, but as actual ... well benchmarks.

First with all fans and pumps at max, maximum noise, all vents, doors and grills open to the dust produced a performance benchmark score of 15,960.  I soak tested the system with both prime95 and furmark and the GPU didn't get past 50*C, the CPU did get to 80*C (more on that later). 

Then with all the doors, vents and filters back in place and a "sensible" quiet fan profile which is almost silent when not under load, but turns into the tornado again when it sees GPU and/or CPU load.  That only dropped the benchmark score by 40 points.  Heat soaking it showed only a few degrees increase and virtually no effect on peak clocks, though I didn't test/graph average clocks across cores.  The "peak core clock" will be the "golden core" the rest will be less than that.

So, I tried to set up a "quiet gaming" profile.  Again, pumps, fans all low or off until load is detected, but this time not immediately spinning up to full performance mode, but slowly following the temperature not reaching 100% until 80*C on the GPU.  Similar profile for the CPU.  The benchmark was still 15,9xx and the GPU didn't get past 61*C even under full stress load 61*C with a fan speed of 25% and it was stable.  Wow.  Maybe I went OTT on the cooling LOL, a bit.

So, why the hell not?  I switched all the fans off and hit it in both the CPU and GPU with max load.  After 5 minutes, the CPU was at 90*C, but still holding peak core clocks of 4.7Ghz!  Damn psychopathic thing! However it was the GPU that was raising much more concern.  It was slowly creeping up through 70*C.  The GPU radiator had become too hot to hold my finger on.  When would it stop?  What temperature of water can the fittings, tubes and radiators handle (quick google, target under 40C, don't exceed 60C).  Abort!

This test was so interesting because it forced me to try and derive the water temperature from the core temperatures.  Alternating between 100% load and 0% load with no fan support produces a sloppy square wave on the thermals with an amplitude of, in my case about 30*C for the GPU and a huge 50*C on the CPU. Poking at the radiators with my mark one temp probe (my finger), it seemed fair that this amplitude more or less accounts for the thermal junction delta between the cores and the water (the main heat mass) in the loop and as it's circulating, the radiator.

So at 75*C which is where I chicken out, the water temp would only have been 45*C, too hot for me to stand in a shower that temp, so as it was uncomfortable under my finger after 10 seconds or so, I took 45*C as the finger in the air estimate.  Which is fine.

I'm tempted to see how far I can actually push that, can I get the card to hit the thermal limiter before the water cooling system blows a radiator fitting out.

But first.  I need a set of stick on thermal couples and a way to data log them on to the PC. (Sit down at the back Ardy folks!).  Don't want to push it higher without an actual measured temp on the radiator and/or block itself.

Back to the CPU.  50*C is too high, and higher still if the CPU gets up to 95*C the water temp is still under 40C.  I will have to remove the cooler, clean off the "came on it from the factory" thermal goo, add some "actually bought" stuff and see if that helps.  I fear it won't help much.  The issue is the heat spreader and multi die design.  Unlike the GPU which is a dead flat block of silicon to interface with, the CPU has a tin lid on it which is thermally bonded to the dies underneath and tries to spread the heat out and prevent hot spotting.  But it also introduces another thermal junction (or two) which do add up.  De-lidded CPUs (when they were single die) would usually lower their junction loss to 40*C or less.  I'm not going to start delidding it.  As long as I can use the fans to keep the radiator under 35*C a 50*C delta I can live with.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
Current Open Projects:  STM32F411RE+ESP32+TFT for home IoT (NoT) projects.  Child's advent xmas countdown toy.  Digital audio routing board.
 

Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #41 on: April 15, 2022, 12:55:30 pm »
Overclocking the GPU got me a little more benchmark score of 16,444 however it later turned out to be unstable.  +200 core and +800 RAM seemed to be stable, but to be honest, I don't think I'll bother to keep it overclocked.  It's hitting it's power limiter 99.9% of the time, so the boost clocks are limited by that anyway, if I clock it up, it will just clock itself back down again, the higher boost clocks will only effect light loads not hitting the limiter, but will most likely hit the voltage limiter and become unstable.

Much the same for the CPU, switch on it's auto AI overclocking gubbins and let it be.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
Current Open Projects:  STM32F411RE+ESP32+TFT for home IoT (NoT) projects.  Child's advent xmas countdown toy.  Digital audio routing board.
 

Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #42 on: April 15, 2022, 12:58:14 pm »
Now... I could pull the wool over it's eyes and flash a compatible BIOS from a "more expensive" card, like the OC version BIOS which goes to 110% power limiter.  Or the top of the range which goes to 125% power limit, I believe.  Trouble is, at some point something in there that wasn't specced for a 125% power limit card is going to melt or let magic smoke out and that's an £800 replacement as I'm not getting that one past RMI inspection.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
Current Open Projects:  STM32F411RE+ESP32+TFT for home IoT (NoT) projects.  Child's advent xmas countdown toy.  Digital audio routing board.
 

Offline Berni

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #43 on: April 15, 2022, 01:08:26 pm »
To get significantly more speed out of a graphics card you usually need to upgrade the cooling to keep up. Watercooling does wonders on those, but it can get rather complicated because you not only need to cool the GPU but also the RAM around it and the VRMs. Due to every card being slightly different means that you need a solution designed for a particular card or be creative with adapting a generic solution. Even more serious overclocking involves replacing the shunt resistor that measures the power draw, this can trick a card into pulling >500W but as you might think not all VRMs are designed with enough heard room to survive that. Also an exploding VRM has a good chance of frying the GPU since it is what is making its core voltage.

For actual day to day use i tend to downclock graphics cards. They run a lot quieter at about 75% of max TDP and are typically still fast enough to do the job. Also helps with the room not getting as hot in the summer.

For the CPU the easiest speed gain is adjusting the bios to allow all cores to constantly run at the max boost clock speed. That generally will never become unstable unless the motherboard can't keep up with power delivery or the cooling can't keep it cool. Each core is capable of reaching that boost speed anyway, it just takes a lot of power if all do it.
 

Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #44 on: April 15, 2022, 01:57:02 pm »
Interesting points.  It seems things have changed somewhat in 2020+.  NVidia GPUs used to come with power and temp limiters set at 100%, but could be slammed up to 120% to "overclock" the card out of the box.  At 120% power limit it is able to clock high enough to overwhelm it's cooling.  So throwing more and more cooling at it gives you higher and higher clocks and more and more fps.

But today, the cards are hard limited to 100% power limit, unless you pay more for the card with upgraded VRMs et.al and a different BIOS to get 110% power limit... it's only when you pay through the nose for the top of the line variants do you get access to the full 120/125% overclock.  Only then is it likely to overload an air only cooler and could thermal throttle the boost clocks.

Which is another NVidia change from 10xx cards to 30xx cards.  They are absolute psycopaths with their own internal overclocking.  I've push it to 85*C before it even started to clock back the boost.  It carried on until it hit 95*C when the screen went black for a heart stopping second, it force slammed it's fans to 100% for a few seconds, recovered at 80*C again and carried on.

I just ran 3 3DMark bench marks.  With full fans.  With minimal fans and with no fans at all.  All of them gave scores within 1% of each other.  All of them limited by the power limiter.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
Current Open Projects:  STM32F411RE+ESP32+TFT for home IoT (NoT) projects.  Child's advent xmas countdown toy.  Digital audio routing board.
 

Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #45 on: April 15, 2022, 02:00:42 pm »
In that case of CPUs though.  Certainly on AMD, it is not longer viable to set fixed core frequencies and work out the fastest stable speed you can get.  The chips are fully capable of melting themselves in minutes, so hitting it with it's full 4.8Ghz on all cores will very quickly create thermal issues and instability.  You end up running them at 4.5Ghz to be stable.  Throwing away 300Mhz because your pride won't let you switch to auto overclocking.

The AMD overclocker is far more aggressive than I would be doing it manually.  If it's idle and you hit it with a single thread, it splits it between the 2 best cores so both stay cool and both go to maximum (stable for that moment) boost clock, which switching all but 1 of the other cores to Standby.  That last core takes everything else the PC is doing.  Automatic thread balancing and dynamic core affinity at the CPU level.
"What could possibly go wrong?"
Current Open Projects:  STM32F411RE+ESP32+TFT for home IoT (NoT) projects.  Child's advent xmas countdown toy.  Digital audio routing board.
 

Online themadhippy

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #46 on: April 15, 2022, 02:56:08 pm »
To think,not that long ago all you needed to overclock your cpu was a pencil
 

Online BrianHG

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #47 on: April 15, 2022, 06:25:25 pm »
 :-- How come I do not see your 'home made' USB Audio DAC in the images?
No sound?
 

Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #48 on: April 16, 2022, 07:20:08 am »
:-- How come I do not see your 'home made' USB Audio DAC in the images?
No sound?
This one?


The audio in the new board is better :)  Actually the audio in the last one was better too.

I still have my amp I made back then though.  Still working fine.  Runs off the 12V solar feed so it's quiet.  The new PC audio with headphones current limits at 20mA as is normal.  So it destroys bass at volume.  Thus I still use my custom headphone, which is theoretically capable of 200mA, though I hardly see it pull more than 40mA.

"What could possibly go wrong?"
Current Open Projects:  STM32F411RE+ESP32+TFT for home IoT (NoT) projects.  Child's advent xmas countdown toy.  Digital audio routing board.
 

Offline tautech

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Re: New PC build p0rn photos.
« Reply #49 on: April 16, 2022, 01:08:55 pm »
Avid Rabid Hobbyist.
Some stuff seen @ Siglent HQ cannot be shared.
 


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