today's video is all about using the right hardware for the job so we
actually learned a couple of years ago you can check that video up here if you
want that just because you've got a workload that traditionally scales
really well with lots of processor cores
like video encoding doesn't necessarily
mean that it will scale infinitely and we ran into a situation where adding
more processing course to our video encoding server actually resulted in
significantly less performance for spending significantly more money so we
actually found that the sweet spot was somewhere in the 8 to 10 core range with
frequency actually being far more important than core count beyond that
point fast forward a couple of years though and the 6950x 10 core overclocked
extreme edition processor that we equip this thing with
is not only no longer the ruler of the roost
it's actually significantly slower than even consumer-grade a-core chips that
you can buy today for a fraction of the cost
so we're going to pull this bad boy out get it dusted off swap out some hardware
and see just how fast we can make her fly
uh you guys ready for me to pull down the render server
all good sweet thanks guys
speaking of all good lttstore.com is full of all good cool
stuff like this hoodie the house stealth hoodie is finally in stock go check it
out that's lttstore.com we're going to have that linked in the video description
before we go any further i feel like i should explain why we need a render
server in the first place you might think well if you've got a powerful
workstation surely you can cut together your video export it and upload it to
youtube all without sending it out to a separate server for processing and we
could do that but there are some workflow advantages to doing things the
way that we do so whether we're shooting on our reds or on our canon c200s we
take whatever file type that we originally shot we dump it into our
premiere project and we set premiere to use a cineform timeline so cineform is a
mezzanine codec that has great performance on the timeline and it
retains a great deal of the image quality from the original file it also
has some other advantages so compared to codecs that use iframes like h.264
cineform is much easier to kind of uh
chop pieces out of without having to completely re-render your file so
something that we can do is if we set our timeline to cineform render all the
files out in cineform and then make a change like pulling a sponsor spot out
for flow plane we can very quickly export two different versions of that
video without taking up a bunch of time on the editor's workstation allowing
them to get back to work now we could take that finished cineform file and
upload it directly to youtube only problem is it's anywhere from 30 to 60
gigabytes for the average Linus tech tips video which even though our internet here is
really fast still takes a long time to upload to youtube because there are
transfer speed limits on their side so what we need to do then instead is take
our cineform file here you can see we're remoted into that server right now and
convert it to h.264 which will not only
upload faster on youtube it will also process faster and more reliably
here comes oh man that's heavy
okay
oh all right let's see how
brutal this thing is inside ready
wow that's actually not that bad it's almost like
dust filters are a really really good idea
so let's walk through how this thing was configured in the first place we've got
a triple 120 millimeter fan with some of Noctua's industrial ppc fans on it for
cooling it's actually you can't really tell but it's uh it's lifted about this
much off the bottom of the server chassis so that as these fans
draw air through the front of the case these ones suck that cool air up through
the radiator and then the warm air kind of gets blown along this way for our
reservoir we went with a like a metal one because i didn't want any risk of
leaking whatsoever you can see it actually has very little evaporation too
which is really nice a d5 pump because reliability
is absolutely the most important thing in a build like this and raid one drives
uh those aren't that reliable of drives those are 10 year old force 120. it
doesn't matter we've got 32 gigs of RAM this was the stuff we painted actually
for a project quite a long time ago and then i went with a gtx 980. now normally
you wouldn't need like a gaming graphics card in something like this but some of
the workloads that it handles are cuda accelerated and we did get a performance
improvement from that so we chucked it in there so the only things we're really
replacing today are going to be the motherboard the CPU and the memory and
then i also grabbed a an rtx 2080 ti to
see if maybe after we upgrade our CPU there could be some benefit from a
faster GPU so let's get started
so pretty much every aspect of this is getting an upgrade we are dropping down
from 10 gore's to a course but because
they're faster ones i'm still expecting a performance improvement we're going
from 26 66 megahertz memory all the way up to 3200 megahertz memory and that is
with lower timings to boot and we're of
course going from this older x99 motherboard to a new z391
so let's hope that since my last project using this thing i had to ultimately
pull it out of my system because of a Thunderbolt snafu
our inventory team didn't actually
take the water block off the motherboard because that would be a bit of a hassle
for me to reinstall and they did
oh they took the CPU out of it too uh
guys i guess i'm gonna have to put the whole
thing back on again oh
oh they took it apart even more than it comes apart to start with
this is going to take me a bit all right so that's done let's go ahead
and pop this bad boy in here
and oh yeah
this board is wider than standard atx so i'm gonna need to move my ssds
ah well that's some good double-sided tape
i think i bet this drive now let's try and put the board in
all right just need to plug in all the fans
plug in our power and now we need to swap out our original CPU
block for this one that cools the entire board
and CPU and vrm and all that
now i have a crazy idea normally
you would think well Linus the best way to do that is probably to drain the
whole loop connect everything and then refill it but i think we can
skip the draining step as long as we keep the part of the loop that we open
at the highest point just a second
i'm gonna prop it up on my graphics card
i'm just gonna crack this open i can't find my vice grips so this is not really
optimal but ah so everything that's under me is
waterproof i think yeah tubing fittings reservoir
industrial ppc fans
there let's go ahead and undo the other side
yeah not much in there now here's the risky part i need to keep these two
level because if one goes too high the water will go down down down down
down and splurge out the other side oh hi
oh i think it's in now let's see if this one reaches
i should just rename the channel to like low effort water cooling
tips forget it i'm just gonna get a mac pro
no i'm kidding that's not actually a better solution so these are 3 200
megahertz c14 now if Gigabyte's not impressed with
what i'm doing with their high-end gaming components i'm sure g-skill is on
a whole other level here let's throw the GPU back in and then we're good to go
this is really a very horrible mounting mechanism
i'm not even going to try and screw it in this time i don't know why i bothered
okay so all that's left is to fire it up and see if it still
works there's definitely water in there
come on baby
try giving it ye old reseat ncmos clear
and see if that resolves it
hey whoa whoa hey hey hold on
no idea what happened but it's up whoa
BIOS has been reset nice so theoretically all we have to do is
press 5.1 gigahertz oc
and it'll work now this will probably take a few minutes changing chipsets
and check this shiz out my friends we
are booted not bad
now neither of our network controllers have drivers here so i'm gonna have to
download those but then we should be uh sitting pretty pretty quick here all
right so while i reboot for a driver install we're just gonna top up the
water here we did lose a little bit of water and our new block
takes up a lot more of it so let's just
do some precision pouring with the Linus tech chips water bottle
not a supported use case for the Linus tech tips water bottle that's about as
full as it was before i guess sick
so the purpose of what we're doing here is to ensure that we're actually getting
the 5.1 gigahertz that were advertised when the system's idle it's not
necessarily going to be running at that speed but let's go ahead and hit it with
a heavy CPU load and see what happens hey not bad
okay then we survived our cinebench test so that
means the last thing for us to do is
try to enable xmp
which will adjust our memory automatically
to its faster speed and tighter timings
i don't have a lot of hope for this it's a good sign
that's a good sign too now that we've got that dialed in let's make sure it's
not completely unstable do a quick cinebench extreme run
eight threads at over five gigahertz ed oh yeah and your server has RGB now
yeah so we seem to be stable we actually got 10 more points went from 568 to 578 so
we're gonna go ahead and shut down cinebench here no i don't want to save
it and uh ed show me where our sample project is why don't we do the tech link
now TechLinked even though it doesn't take that long to render is the kind of
project where the faster it goes the nicer it is because it's only about 10
minutes but because we write shoot and edit it all within the same day
the faster it exports renders and uploads the faster everybody gets to go
home so let's go ahead and process is it just this one right here
uh so i'm going to remove this from the queue
and we're going to find out
what do you think think it's going to be faster
did it crash stopped
did even the reset switch not work that's pretty crash let's turn xmp off
and people wonder why i don't like xmp
never works all right we've got one more
trick up our sleeves i pulled two of the sticks i think 16 gigs of RAM should be
plenty for our workload here and we're gonna see if it's a little
more stable without all the memory slots loaded up
yep there it is good good good overclocked
running at the right frequency all right
let's try that sample project again
now what's interesting is our CPU is actually only running at
4.8 gigahertz right now i wonder if xmp is kind of screwing us
here all right guys we are really close to results time here so for TechLinked
our time to beat is nine minutes 48
seconds and it looks like we're gonna come in
well under that let's have a look here
come on baby you have got to be kidding me
nine minutes and 19 seconds
maybe we really did need those other two cores
so here's the situation we only beat our score by about 30
seconds uh which is not the kind of improvement
that we were looking for so there's a couple factors at play here
one is that even though i don't think this is an avx workload it's kind
of behaving like one so our CPU turbos to 5.05 or 5.1 in cinebench but only
hits 4.8 here which looks like an avx
offset so we're not getting quite the clock
speed we were expecting and two it appears that my recollection may have
been incorrect or adobe may have updated their encoder because our CPU is getting
absolutely pinned to a hundred percent in many cases here
it may be that we actually do need
more cores so there's no way around it we need to
reevaluate here
this project has really challenged everything i thought i knew about our
video export workload so what we're going to have to do is take things
entirely back to the drawing board and to do that
i've set up a test bench here so it's much quicker for me to swap things in
and out with Intel's 18 core 7980xe with
the goal being to determine well gee
exactly how many cores do we need for this how well does it
scale so the idea here is once we know that we
can then find the fastest chip with that many cores
and try this whole thing again so based on
what we're looking at here with loads anywhere from about the 75 to 85 range
on this thing we can guess and this will be a
far from perfect guess but we can guess that maybe something in the neighborhood
of 14 cores could be the right answer
fortunately we have a very unique ace up our sleeve this courtesy of our friends
over at puget because the only way to get this chip is through Intel's like
secret special auction is a core i9 99 90 xe it actually has
fewer cores than a 9980xc at only 14
versus 18 but it turbos to five gigahertz and its base
clock is four gigahertz
so why don't we give it a shot then charlie got nothing else to lose
just time naturally
changing out the CPU necessitates
another motherboard swap so once again this poor
aorus water cooled board is getting pulled from a project
not because it did a bad job but just because
it wasn't the right fit
after all this going back to the original block
so stupid
how bad is it oh it's definitely dripping a bit
now something to be aware of guys is that while electronics and
water definitely don't mix as long as they're not powered the
likelihood of doing permanent damage is actually very low
not very low it's lower
oh yeah i'm just looking pretty bad this time okay here we go
and
you're outta there beautiful
where's that block yep it's on the floor
so that goes to the inlet and that goes to the outlet
go ahead and cut for the board i'm going with a primex 299 deluxe
not for any particular reason other than that that's what i found on the shelf
all right so here we go even though it's 14 compared to 18 cores
because of its much higher frequencies this is a 200 205 watt TDP CPU
and that's assuming that's accounting for Intel's optimism with respect to
their tdps
all right now we're ready blocks on
cables are routed strap it in
all right it's reassembled please work like just work
it occurs to me this is a relatively new CPU and i have no idea when this
board's BIOS was last updated heck yeah
heck yeah all right it's a good sign
techlinked transcode.mov
and it doesn't look like it's going to be
any faster at all curiously our CPU
usage is significantly lower than it was on
the 18 core okay
and our time is looking like it's going to
come in just over seven minutes for the
raw encode which should put us right around the same time so we're at 9
38 which is 10 seconds faster than our original
configuration but actually 20 seconds slower than our water cooled overclocked
9900k but i think we can do a little better
here it occurs to me that just because xmp didn't work on that other board
doesn't mean it won't work on this one because it might have been optimized for quad channel operation
so we're going to go ahead and
try again with xmp good luck everyone
well this puppy's definitely hauling now we're seeing turbo speeds floating right
around the 4 gigahertz range
and that estimated time remaining looks like it might be as much as 30 45
seconds faster than our last run what remains to be seen is whether or not
it's stable surprisingly was stable enough to finish
the render all right good job xmp
hey 850.
wow so we actually crushed our original time
that time goes to show you what more cores more
clock speed and faster memory will do for you wow that's almost by a full
minute so now that we've at least managed to make the machine faster
i think i'm going to stop fooling around because this is two full days that the
editors haven't had their transcode server but
i'm also feeling pretty inspired right now because we did manage to get better
results than this with that weird 1u Gigabyte overclockable server that we
checked out a little while ago so what i think is that with a better designed
water cooling system maybe a board with
beefier vrms or something along those lines that we could push this further i
think our 500 watt power supply might actually be holding us back as well so
we're going to leave this one here for now but next time i'm going to be coming
back at you guys with a custom designed enclosure that's really going to let
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