Build Log: 100,000 PPD by 1/23/2011

[shoota]

Good work. Be careful with that electricity

[Tom128]

Never measured the wattage they use, but what about a $20 box fan from target? Im sure the static pressure is not the best but...that's alot of fan none the less.

[trn]

I have one of those, and I keep meaning to put it on the kill-a-watt. I'll make sure I get around to that and post up some results.

[Jaco]

don't know if you're aware but there's a new bios out for your board

'Kompatibilität Westmere-EP verbessert'

http://www.jzelectronic.de/jz2/index.php

[trn]

I can't check out that site... work network is blocking it I have tried the FB bios bios that @bios downloads with no luck.

I found these files on the gigabyte.asia server:

/FileList/BIOS/mb_bios_ga-x58a-ud3r_2.x_fb11.exe
/FileList/BIOS/mb_bios_ga-x58a-ud3r_2.x_fb5.exe
/FileList/BIOS/mb_bios_ga-x58a-ud3r_2.x_fb16.exe

i'll give some of these a try because it would be really nice to get these UD3R rev 2.0's working (another 5 just showed up yesterday so i'm up to a total of 8 rev 2.0 boards.)

[Jaco]

09.09.10
GA-X58A-UD3R rev2.0 - TestBetaBIOS Fc1
1. Kompatibilität Westmere-EP verbessert

good chance it might fix your issues

[trn]

Excelent!! i'm going to try that out as soon as I get home

*edit: I just went over to cruise the unofficial x58a-UD3R thread here in the Intel sub-section and found this:

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...&postcount=276

hicookie (from Gigabyte) posted a response to my problems (with the same Bios that Jaco linked.) So a big for Gigabyte and their community members!

Made my day, I was a bit bummed to find out that the Enzotech CPU blocks were not in stock at my favorite local online retailer and they had to drop ship them ground from California which means mid next week delivery instead of today or yesterday oh well... I can find other stuff to work and not rush the rest of the build too much.

[pirogue]

2) Started to build my Radiator housing today, the Radiators are going to be mounted horizontally just like shown; fans will be in the top of the box, and there will be a shroud to exhaust the hot air out the window below the radiators.

I've been reading this thread with fascination and thought of something that *might* save you some electricity.

If you built something like a chimney and vented it into your attic, the updraft of cooler air from the floor might be enough airflow to keep things cool. You could use the styrofoam sheeting that is used under siding to make it lightweight and inexpensive. Of course, how well it would work would depend on how well your attic is ventilated.

Even if you still needed a fan for extra oomph, you wouldn't have to worry about water coming through the window and you'd have more flexibility on the placement.

[trn]

I've been reading this thread with fascination and thought of something that *might* save you some electricity.

If you built something like a chimney and vented it into your attic, the updraft of cooler air from the floor might be enough airflow to keep things cool. You could use the styrofoam sheeting that is used under siding to make it lightweight and inexpensive. Of course, how well it would work would depend on how well your attic is ventilated.

Even if you still needed a fan for extra oomph, you wouldn't have to worry about water coming through the window and you'd have more flexibility on the placement.

Thats a very interesting concept and I think it would work very well in cold climates. I was inspired by others mass water cooled build logs and am modifying the projects I've seen to fit my needs. Living in South Florida i'm planning for year round hot environment running. I'm going for a decent amount of fan firepower to turn over the air in my garage every few minutes or so and keep my garage temperatures under control. I plan on removing the weather stripping from the top inside edge of my garage door this weekend for an air intake. That should be ~20' x 1" so enough intake for sure.

My attic temperatures FL sun all day long. This is what i'm planning to deal with year round:

January 74.5 F
February 75.3 F
March 79.3 F
April 82.5 F
May 85.7 F
June 88.1 F
July 89.7 F
August 90.1 F
September 88.4 F
October 84.4 F
November 79.6 F
December 75.7 F

Constantly hot but never in the 100's.


I do expect my build to be energy efficient per point. If I run a computer in my house and it dumps ~150w of heat into my home then mostly year round thats 150w of energy I have to remove with AC so I get hit twice with the power usage. With 7 hexacores going (and a lot at stock) they dump a large amount of heat into my house. By not having to pay for the extra AC to remove the heat and dumping the heat directly outside I expect to be "energy efficient per point."

[nanoprobe]

I plan on removing the weather stripping from the top inside edge of my garage door this weekend for an air intake. That should be ~20' x 1" so enough intake for sure

That will also leave a 1 inch gap for critters to get in. You know how they are if you live in Fla.

[OldChap]

Is it windy where you are?

I was thinking of buying/building a flettner style roof vent or two

Q2. have you got a garage wall in direct sunlight that you could adapt to passive cooling?

[trn]

Time for a project update:

First of all:

Thanks to Slaveondope for providing 2 hard drives

I worked today on the electrical for my farm. And first of all thanks to [XC] Hicks121 for the advise and help on the electrical work

The electrical was on of the more intimidating and tough things on my check list. It was a hard sweaty dirty day of work in the garage and attic to get this done. I think I drank and sweated out 4 liters of water just today; mix that with digging around in fiberglass insulation and just all the other sorts of dirt and grime that comes from manual labor and I needed a nice long shower at the end of the day today. I have much respect for the people that do this every day!

Starting; the plumb lines will be the conduit lines. I am running 4 120v 20amp lines to quadplex outlets. The blue tape represents my ceiling joist:


I'll skip all the grimy work and just get to the good stuff Heres my first outlet up and running, thanks to a good walk through from Hicks everything went really smooth; I didn't have to redo anything or stop working to go buy more electrical equipment.


Heres a preview of the final product: Only the 4th line is live right now and I still need to add a few wall straps to the conduit; easy work for tomorrow:


This is how I left my panel for the night. The sun was starting to set so I didn't wire lines 1, 2, and 3 at the panel; I taped them off for the night and labeled them. More easy work for tomorrow.


Well; thats progress for the day. I changed from my original plan of running 240V lines and sticking with 120V. I lose a % or two of PSU efficiency but I can buy off the shelf surge protectors and UPS's with 120V. My power has been very stable here recently but sometimes lightning storms can cause brown outs or short power outages so it would be nice to have the farm all on UPS's eventually to keep running through a brownout or 15 second power outage.

I've been messing around with Linux some at night and really struggled with Xorg config; the new 1.8 config file system . Making me rethink my plan of installing Linux on all the new computers i'm adding. Maybe I just need to bite the bullet and give ubuntu server a go. With my Linux boxes I plan on running Boinc as a daemon and doing most admining from the console (I've found CPU usage looks to be a few % better without X or boinc manager or any WDM running also and X is probably the weakest link on any Linux computer.) But X and a VNC client is needed because boinccmd (command line manager) just sucks! More to come on this later; but i'm think 50% Windows and 50% Linux might be a good mix of rigs.

My x58a-UD3R Rev 2.0 Westmere A0 woes are over; the new Fc1 (beta FC bios) works great and I have two rev 2.0 boards up and running with L5640s and the same bios settings as my rev 1.0 boards.

More toys have been showing up with a few more simple things on the way. I have a small pile of mcp655's, UD3R's, PSU, networking equipment behind me now. Thats all for now; off to see Inception now (which I missed when it came out on Imax being away from home.)

[slaveondope]

Time for a project update:

First of all:
*snip
Thanks to Slaveondope for providing 2 hard drives

Glad to help I take it they survived shipping.

Looks like things are coming together nicely, now treat yourself to a bear

[Sparky]

I thought you were going with 240V, for that small efficiency bump?

[trn]

Glad to help I take it they survived shipping.

Looks like things are coming together nicely, now treat yourself to a bear

I liked the "newegg" packaging I havn't had a chance to check em out yet (and see what kinda naughty files you might have stored on them )

I thought you were going with 240V, for that small efficiency bump?

Change of plan; it was UPSs that made my decision and just sticking with the plain conventional US power. Eventually I would like to have enough UPS's to keep the farm (and water cooling) up and running through brownouts or short power outages. Sometimes I travel a lot so long term stability is a goal of mine.

Something like 123bob's setup (behind the chair) would be nice.

[disturbed13]

very nice
cant wait to see this thing done and up and running

[jcool]

Nice work on the electrics trn
By the way, I had no trouble whatsoever setting up the UD3R Rev. 2 with an i7 930 and FB bios, so the board itself is fine, just need a bios fix for Westmere

On another note, are you sure you want to go with Enzotech blocks? They kind of have a history of breaking and/or leaking...
Not sure what the prices are like for you US guys, but over here EK Supreme HF and the Heatkiller LT are not only the best but also the cheapest blocks around.

[Sparky]

Change of plan; it was UPSs that made my decision and just sticking with the plain conventional US power. Eventually I would like to have enough UPS's to keep the farm (and water cooling) up and running through brownouts or short power outages. Sometimes I travel a lot so long term stability is a goal of mine.

I see. Understandable. The 240V UPSes can be very expensive.

[SiGfever]

Great project and a lot of hard work, bravo sir!

[trn]

Nice work on the electrics trn
By the way, I had no trouble whatsoever setting up the UD3R Rev. 2 with an i7 930 and FB bios, so the board itself is fine, just need a bios fix for Westmere

On another note, are you sure you want to go with Enzotech blocks? They kind of have a history of breaking and/or leaking...
Not sure what the prices are like for you US guys, but over here EK Supreme HF and the Heatkiller LT are not only the best but also the cheapest blocks around.

FA bios was garbage for my B1 gulftowns, entering the M.I.T. menu in in the bios would cause the bios to lock. FB works fine but no luck with the A0's; and the Fc1 works good with the A0 bios; so they just needed a bios fix for my Q3NC's; retail stepping seem to work fine with the FB bios . Anyways; i'm happy to see that Gigabyte released a fix so quickly; makes me wonder if they patched the bios just because I let them know (I can't imagine too many people having problems with their Q3NC's; must be a rare combo.) So another for Gigabyte.

I went with the Enzotech blocks already At this point I'll just have to make sure I do a good 12h+ leak test; thanks for the heads up I didn't know of quality issues with the Enzotech's. Pricing was good, with mounting bracket they cost $47 vs $75 for a Heatkiller or EK; those savings add up when the quantities are large. I also heard the sapphire blocks are very low restriction blocks which I was looking for. I plan for each sub-loop to go through 3 blocks then back to the res > rad > rad > res with a mcp655 (like Fallwinds farm but with an extra rad and more tubing.)

[Jaco]

Now there's also a new bios for my UD4P with better Westmere compatibility
Probably fixes the issues with my A0 too.

[[XC] Hicks121]

Hey brother! Glad everything worked out for you. I was expecting a call yesterday...lol....It looks really good.

[trn]

Hey brother! Glad everything worked out for you. I was expecting a call yesterday...lol....It looks really good.

Knowing what components to buy ahead of time made the electrical work go smoothly. Once I know I had all the right stuff its just a matter of making it all fit together

Todays Update:

Finished the wiring in the morning and got the panel back together. All 4 outlets worked right the first time; I didn't have to go back and rework anything thankfully. The top right 4 breakers are the ones I installed; 4 20amp breakers.


Shelves in place with the rad holder in place at mid-day; I ran an internet cable this morning also which is just dangling above my racks to be plugged into a switch that will go on the top shelf.


I soaked the rads with a ~50/50 Water Vinegar mixture last night; so this morning I gave them a good final flushing with the garden hose. Unfortunately I could not find a local shop that would soak and flush the rads so I had to do it the hard-way but they are good to go now.


I ran the plumbing to the the rads and reservoirs for a leak test. Unfortunately I failed that test miserably . The first joint I filled to where the small piping intersets the 4" PVC piping leaks bad so I stopped the test right there and drained down to that point. No suprise that those joints leak, I had to do some custom dremel work at for those holes. If I was to do that again I would look for a brass connector with threads that I could tap into the PVC piping for a more secure fit. Tomorrow i'll go back over the top of all the joints were the small piping meets the 4" piping with another 2 layers of 'goop' and hope that does the trick.


I'll post up some more detailed pics of the WC setup once I get my leaks solved.

[tived]

wow, that is commitment!

Excellent work.

Speaking of electics...anyone thought of using Solar power, in particular in a place like Florida?

Henrik

A Dane Down Under

[D_A]

There's a whole thread on it here somewhere.