So two weeks ago I got all my stuff in for my 2nd renderfarm box, I put it together and got it running but neglected to post on here for some reason, now that I am home from work and need to study for a statistics test in the morning I figured I would fill you all in, and procrastinate a bit…
Here it the farm so far:
The build:
iStarUSA Black 2U Rackmount Case (350w)
Intel X3220 Xeon 2.4ghz
Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L Mobo (EP= Energy saver/green)
80gb Western Digital
8gb Ocz Gold ram
So, the build went pretty fast but I had a lot of trouble overclocking this thing, but more on that later…I went with a Xeon because I thought the price trade off from a Q series chip was well worth the 15c variance in thermal specifications, that is, the Xeon can take hotter temperatures (turned out coming in VERY handy). The chip is just like the Q6600 in other respects, as far as you need to know. On to the build…So, the 2U case was, well, 2U, thats 3.5″ tall, which makes things interesting, you have to use a power supply and you have to find a heatsink which is small enough to fit in there.
So, here is a pic before we get down to the nitty-gritty:
As you can see I needed to fit all of those parts into that small case, small compared to a standard case, that is. Yes it does fit, and no the router went in the rack, not the case…
So after I got everything from the post office, I came back home and put it all together:
Now, because this is sitting in a rack and I have no need for opengl or any type of graphical rendering I figured that all I normally needed was a remote desktop connection, so, there was no need for a video card. However, you do need a video card to install the OS, overclock, and while you are configuring the network settings…So, before I booted the machine for the first time I had to put one in (I have a few spare cards laying around), sp when I first tried to put a video card in, I used the little riser they have for the PCI slots so they will work with the case (notice the slots in the case are sideways instead of vertical), so I put the card in, it fit fine, and I proceeded to boot the machine. In a blink of an eye my room was full of black smoke! Before I could turn off the machine, a few of the circuits in the extender totally melted down…Thats no good…
Since I could not put a video card in the case anymore, I had to pull the supports out of the case, then the tray, and prop it ontop of the machine…
Now, when I tried to flip the switch after I did this the machine would not boot, did I fry the mobo? No not quite, I just didnt have sufficient ground. I had the metal of the tray touch the case some more and it fired up fine. Once I booted I installed the OS, confuigured the network, updated drivers and bios, installed my programs, and proceeded to overclock, and here is where it got a little crazy. Error after error, after a week of testing and tweaking I finally got a stable 3.0 overclock. The hard drive corrupted, I had errors with DMI, the video got all wonky, and several other things went very, very wrong…
Anyway, I finally got it configured and running right. The power supply is by far the loudest thing in my room, over my 4 other computers and window AC unit, its like an F14 on the tarmac, the worthless heatsink doesnt help either…I may need to do some modding down the road…My load temps are around 65c well within the range of the chip, and the temp of the server rack is about 95F…After I got the machine up and running I put it in the rack with the new router (nice, but slow) and did some cable management…Here is the result…
And for anyone wondering, so far the rack pulls 330w at peak, and by my extremely loose estimate costs about 65 cents a day to run at 100% load.
Anyway, I should get back to cramming studying for that test…