Retrowave posted at 8:54PM Fri, 31 January 2020 - #4378459

I hope Ohki doesn't mind me sticking my nose in, but I have to ask Seachnasaigh; what on earth are you doing with all that gear?

At first I thought you were building a personal render farm. Then I thought, nah, it's a bit more than that, he must be hiring out a render farm. Now though, I've changed my mind again and suspect you must be intent on mining every BitCoin in cyberspace!

So what on earth are you building there, or rather, what for?

I tell you what mate, while I join Ohki and I'm guessing everyone else in here in envy, I don't envy your electricity bill

It is just a personal render farm (well, render garden, as DaleB puts it). On occasion I'll help someone with promos for new content. I used it to render those skydome textures in my freebie pack because you can't; several of those skies took twenty dual Xeon machines four-five days to render, a few took over two weeks each.

I don't mine Bitcoins; you'd want chassis with four GPUs each for that. CPUs won't make much progress.

Electricity consumption -and heat production- is indeed a factor to be considered. I installed dedicated breaker boxes just for outlets/receptacles to feed the computers. Heavy gauge copper wire, unbroken from breaker to receptacle ("home run"), hospital grade receptacles. For example, the rack has sixteen blades; these are divided into four groups with four blades each. One 20Amp receptacle feeds each group, through a 3840J surge suppressor. An ammeter displays just how much current is being consumed by each group in real time. The circuits will comfortably deliver 20A all day long, but I've never seen a group pull more than 11Amps.

circuit breakers for the blades:

server circuit breakers.jpg