tictoc

I'll be on the look out for the ASRock boards. I've been pretty much all ASRock for the last 10 years, and ASRock had the best board layouts and features for me on X399, TRX40, and WRX80. Also all of the previous generations had great bifurcation support and far and away the best ECC support. It will be nice to be able to run RDIMMs on the new platform, and not have to spend the premium for ECC UDIMMs. Noctua is offering mounting brackets for their old Threadripper coolers to work on the TR5 socket along with new coolers. https://noctua.at/en/noctua-announces-cpu-coolers-for-amd-s-new-threadripper-and-epyc-processors Eyeballing the socket on the Gigabyte board that leaked, the layout is very similar (or identical), to SP3 and sTRX4. The Noctua press releases mentions increased mounting pressure, but that wouldn't be a big deal to achieve on most full cover blocks.

I don't have any recent comparison numbers, but I don't think much has changed in the last few years. You should see higher PPD/unit on Linux vs Windows. I haven't really ran anything on Windows in many years, but the PPD on Linux was always at least 5% higher than on Windows back when I was actually doing some comparison tests.

In Q_Cruncher Out on prizes.

AMD's press release: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-10-19-amd-introduces-new-amd-ryzen-threadripper-7000-ser.html Release Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF6QbE9rFkM The bump up to 88 PCIe lanes (48 PCIe 5.0) is a nice upgrade over TRX40. Too bad AMD didn't do something more exotic and kit out the TRX50 with 6 channel memory (half of Epyc). At $1499 for the 24 core, I see an uprade in my future. Threadripper 7000 and some 7000pro CPUs are set to release at retailers on Novemeber 21st.

If TRX50 happens, I will be upgrading my 3960X. I can't really justify the Threadripper Pro SKUs, but I would really like to upgrade my workstation. Hopefully this time around there will be at least two CPU generations. I was pretty salty when AMD killed the HEDT platform, and only released the 5xxx CPUs on WRX80. https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-to-launch-threadripper-7000-pro-and-non-pro-zen4-cpus-designed-for-wrx90-and-trx50-motherboards

Sorry for the late reply, I've been out of town for the last couple of weeks. Here's a shot from the top with the fans removed.

This is probably still true, if for no other reason than thermal cycling electronic components pretty much always hastens their eventual death. How much it really matters is up for debate. Exos drives are rated for 600k load/unload cycles and 50k start/stop cycles, so starting up and shutting down once a day wouldn't really put a dent in the rated lifespan. This will likely not be the way I run this. I was just fiddling around with further reducing power consumption. The reduced power consumption is not really worth it to me, with the increased chance of a failed backup due to a start-up/shut-down or WOL packet error. With zero tuning the system idles at 78W. More than half of that power is the drives, nic, and HBA.

Storage will be updated fairly soon, since I will be retiring a few 16TB drives out of my main server. Server will be headless running Arch Linux, and will be mostly asleep using WOL to wake the server idle for backup tasks.

This build is a smallish backup file server that will be the final piece of kit downsizing from my 42U into a 12U rack and two desktop cases. There are a number of similar sized or smaller NAS type chassis available, and the main reason for this build was the price of the case ($59 on NewEgg at purchase) and the fact that I thought I could shove 6 HDDs with little to no modding. The case, motherboard, and CPU are the only parts I purchased for this build, and the rest of the parts are repurposed from other machines. Hardware: Case: Sama IM01 CPU: AMD Ryzen 3 Pro 5350GE Motherboard: AsRock B550M-ITX/ac RAM: 2x 16GB Micron DDR4 3200 ECC UDIMM NIC: No name AQC113 based 10GBASE-T HBA: LSI SAS 9207-8i SSD: Inland Premium 512GB NVMe HDD: 4x 16TB Seagate Exos X16, 1x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro, 1x 8TB Seagate Exos 7E8 PSU: Corsair SF750

The 30 TB model is listed at $2300 USD. https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Solidigm/SBFPFWBV307TOF1?qs=1Kr7Jg1SGW%2BNbgRRG1pe0A%3D%3D&_gl=1*20h1q4*_ga*dW5kZWZpbmVk*_ga_15W4STQT4T*dW5kZWZpbmVk*_ga_1KQLCYKRX3*dW5kZWZpbmVk

It is a pretty small case. I was just using it as refernece to show that if you are going to do a bit of custom work, most any desktop case will work just fine. If you go with the torrent you could get some of these rubber stackers: https://www.amazon.com/SEDNA-Hard-Disk-Rubber-Stand/dp/B07XYBKGWN/ref=sr_1_3?crid=20N040NWGAQVW&keywords=hard+drive+stacker&qid=1690330434&sprefix=hard+drive+stacker%2Caps%2C124&sr=8-3#customerReviews Those require a bit of additional work if you are going to stack a bunch of drives, but in a situation like the torrent, you can install the drives with the cabling facing the motherboard tray. That will make for a nice and clean look, allow the lower front intake fan to cool the drives, and dampen the vibrations from the mechanical drives.

Just made the team switch from my old OCN account. Thinking about dusting off some Windows installs and subbing some benchies for the team. I'll take a look through the hardware pile and see what eligible hardware I have.

How many drives slots do you need/want, 2.5" or 3.5"? It looks like the torrent compact is wide enough that you could stack hdd cages up in the the front of the case. You would just need to make sure that whatever cages you use/print allow for airflow from the side. I would definitely suggest using rubber dampers at all attachment points, but other than that, if you are willing to do a bit of modding you can stuff quite a few drives into most cases. My backup server is about to be transplanted into a 22L case (about half the volume of the Torrent Compact), and that machine will have 6x16TB HDDs, mitx board, 10Gb nic, and an HBA.

A little late on the start, but at least one GPU will be folding for the FaT. --EDIT-- Fired up F@H on the outgoing 2080 Super one last time. +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | NVIDIA-SMI 535.86.05 Driver Version: 535.86.05 CUDA Version: 12.2 | |-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+ | GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC | | Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. | | | | MIG M. | |=========================================+======================+======================| | 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 ... On | 00000000:09:00.0 On | N/A | | 0% 52C P2 203W / 292W | 547MiB / 8192MiB | 97% Default | | | | N/A | +-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+ +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Processes: | | GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory | | ID ID Usage | |=======================================================================================| | 0 N/A N/A 638 G /usr/lib/Xorg 32MiB | | 0 N/A N/A 761 C ...it/22-0.0.20/Core_22.fah/FahCore_22 510MiB | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ I did ease back the clocks a bit for its last hurrah on my bench. nvidia-settings -c :0 -a '[gpu:0]/GPUGraphicsClockOffset[4]=-120'

Life got in the way over the last many months, and I haven't put this router in to production. I am currently just running off of my old EdgeRouter, but I will be putting this build online in the next month or so... Here are some final pics with everything installed and wired up. PiKVM tested and fully functional with the ability to power on/off and access the UEFI remotely. Hardware power and reset buttons are installed behind the front mesh, to the right of the NICs, just to make sure I can't accidentally hit the buttons if I am working on the rack. I am still leaning towards VyOS, but I might ultimately go with OPNSense. I'll post some final pics after it is up and running in the rack.

The final piece to complete my cool and quiet homelab infrastructure rebuild. This case is for my backup server, which will have an ASRock B550M-ITX/ac with an AMD Ryzen 3 Pro 5350GE, 32GB DDR4 ECC UDIMM, 6x 16TB HDDs. Pretty imporessive little case for $53. SAMA-IM01

In Q_Cruncher Out on prizes

I have a few things up and running, so... IN Q_Cruncher You can pull me out of the prize draw.

After battling with some high temps on the HBA, optane drives, and the X550-T2, I finally swapped the fans around on the radiators. Previously the fans were running as intake, and now I have them running as exhaust. In the original configuration, I was never able to get enough front->back airflow to exhaust all the heat that the radiators were dumping into the case. Results from the swap in fan direction are pretty impressive. Temps dropped by 13°C-20°C on the hottest components, and I was also able to drop the speed of the 180mm intake fan by 200rpm.

I did new pads on my 6900XT, but it also got a full cover HeatKiller block at the same time. The pads I used were the same pads I've been using for a very long time on all my cards, which are the Fujipoly ultra extreme. I am just always on the look out for deals, since they are expensive pads. The only card where I saw some major temp drops was with a bunch of highly OC'd 7970's. The workload they were running was basically FurMark on the VRMs. I was able to lower VRM temps by more than 20°C after swapping in the higher quality pads.

Added a few GPUs to the mix. They are not great for F@H, but it will bump up the ppd by 4-5M.

I am folding on a 6900 XT, but not in Windows. For me there is pretty huge range in ppd on various WUs. I see anywhere from 2.7M-6.4M ppd depending on the project that is running. *Edit* Currently folding at 2875core|2150mem

Pretty much what Pook posted, although I forgo the --pause-delay, since I am building from source and that workaround has been fixed in the upstream version. *Edit* Depending on how you're running it, you might need/want to allocate a different amount of memory, but what Pook posted (leaving 3GB available for other processes) should be more or less universally good unless you're doing some other crazy memory intensive things while running stressapptest.