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

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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:

color-coded receptacles for the blades:

The power cords for each blade use matching color coding:

It's just a personality characteristic; I tend to go all-in on anything I do, within budget constraints.

cars...

guns...

bicycles (12-speed rear hub, hydraulic disc brakes, 5.5" suspension travel! )

movida posted at 9:46PM Fri, 31 January 2020 - #4378491

Take the side panel off and leave it off (or even both of them) (if you haven't already). I ran one of mine like that for years and it was fine.Just get the canned air and blow it out periodically. Poor man's water cooling lmao

That might -or might not- exacerbate the problem. A chassis channels airflow around/past each component before exhausting the now-heated air out the back; if the side panel is off, the intake air can blow out that big opening, leaving RAM et cetera baking.

One option is to install extra fans. I often add fans to the exterior rear, using thermal glue. This especially extends the life of battery/surge units (UPS). To power fans on UPS boxes, get a cheap ($14) 450W power supply, and use half of a paper clip as a jumper between these two sockets of the main 24-pin connector to turn it on:

seachnasaigh posted at 10:46PM Fri, 31 January 2020 - #4378497

movida posted at 9:46PM Fri, 31 January 2020 - #4378491

Take the side panel off and leave it off (or even both of them) (if you haven't already). I ran one of mine like that for years and it was fine.Just get the canned air and blow it out periodically. Poor man's water cooling lmao

That might -or might not- exacerbate the problem. A chassis channels airflow around/past each component before exhausting the now-heated air out the back; if the side panel is off, the intake air can blow out that big opening, leaving RAM et cetera baking.

One option is to install extra fans. I often add fans to the exterior rear, using thermal glue. This especially extends the life of battery/surge units (UPS). To power fans on UPS boxes, get a cheap ($14) 450W power supply, and use half of a paper clip as a jumper between these two sockets of the main 24-pin connector to turn it on:

I manage to build my computers but if I started messing with paper clips and electricity I'd probably blow up the house :)

I'll read your instructions a few times and think about it - like your cars and the color coded receptacles are stellar.

That's a seriously cool collection of man-toys you have there, Seachnasaigh! So you're basically an obsessed gear-head then, lol, it looks as if you raided Pixar's spares department in one of those earlier photos!

Hope you're not using that gun for processor hold-ups - "Stick 'em up and hand over the Xeons, right now!"

'Secret' uber-Xeon tip (on a Z600 2x X5670, 24Gb RAM): Poser Firefly loves the max. settings and does best on them. Go to Render Settings, auto, set to Max + quality. Switch to Manual and inherit Auto settings. Set bucket size to a massive 512, and nudge the samples down from 6 to 4. Watch in awe as a 1800 pixel render is done in five seconds. 512 seems to be the 'sweet spot'.