back in 2017 i built what at the time seemed to be essentially the fastest
possible server for transcoding our massive cineform raw export files we're
talking 50 to 70 gigabytes into h.264
mp4s that we could upload to youtube at the time while it was a little janky
the performance was basically as good as i could get then i went to upgrade it
about a year ago testing both a 5.1 gigahertz binned overclocked 9900k as
well as the limited run auction only 9990xc
a 14 core chip capable of 5 gigahertz on
all cores and honestly the results were appalling
neither of the two flagship cpus were able to offer much more than a 10
improvement to our transcoding times making it seem like we had sort of hit a
wall but in that video i did promise you guys a follow-up building up that server
in a sick custom water cooled chassis and we're to do that but with a twist
now that ryzen 3000 series processors are out and matured a little bit we're
going to take another crack at upgrading this machine we're going to test the top
of the line ryzen against the top of the line Intel to see who wins in a
heavyweight encoding showdown and what
better way to do it than to retrofit our old minecraft server chassis into a
balling render server
as many of you know the ultimate minecraft server chassis was designed
and fabbed with the help of protocase and was pretty purpose built around
holding two itx motherboards and
i can assure you guys that
this Threadripper size socket is never coming to an itx motherboard
Jake realized that by removing just one of our three sandwiched radiators in the
front though along with some minor modifications to the motherboard hole
layout we could actually easily fit both a full-sized motherboard and
a compact GPU
and that is something that we're going to need to be able to run our CPU of
choice the ryzen threadripper 3970x
this is AMD's second from the top ryzen 3rd gen CPU with an astonishing 32
course that at least according to puget systems trades blows with even their top
dog 64 core 3990x
at least for adobe premiere exports and given the price difference we're gonna
stick with the 32 core variant even if it means taking a few seconds longer on
our renders so i've got the chassis here i've got
all the bits to put together here and off camera over there
so let's build a water cooled server shall we let's start by taking a look at
the care package Jake sent over to me we've got three 80 millimeter Noctua
cooling fans in the front of our chassis here along with this really sweet
alphacool reservoir that's easy to fill so you just fill it up through the top
here and easy to check your coolant levels with the handy dandy little
window in the front and we've got a d5 pump wired into the back of it we've got
a Corsair fan and RGB lighting controller here and then we've got
another eight 80 millimeter fans between these two 80 millimeter alpha cool
sandwiched radiators so between these three banks of fans we're trying to draw
air in from the front of the chassis and then send it over the motherboard and
out the back and then most of the cooling is going to be handled right
here because both our CPU and graphics card are going to be water cooled with
that sorted out it's time to throw in our motherboard now you might have
noticed that we actually did not bother to change up
the back panel here to make room for our full-sized atx i o
and the reason for that is that honestly speaking it just doesn't matter the only
card we're going to install in this is a graphics card and we're going to be
using a pci express extension cable in order to do that so we'll deal with that
later first let's go ahead and get the motherboard screwed in our reasons for choosing the
rog strix trx40e gaming are pretty
straightforward we wanted something that wasn't pseudo eatx so wider because that
would have interfered with our ability to mount our graphics card and our power supply and uh we wanted something with
two and a half gig Ethernet built in so that we wouldn't need to modify the
chassis to put in a faster network card not that it really matters i mean
nothing we're doing requires greater than gigabit transfer speeds anyway but
it's just kind of a nice to have well i'm not sure if this is the way i would
have preferred to have it done but it seems like Jake intends for me to mount
the graphics card with some vhb tape on
these 3d printed spacers there are screw holes here
which is curious but we apparently will not be
using them our intention had been to go with an rtx
2060 for this build but it did not arrive in time
thanks covid19 so we've got this zotac
GeForce gtx 1080 ti now you might think
oh well not having rtx means you also don't
have the new end vent encoder but that's okay we're just using the cuda cores on
the GPU as opposed to the fixed function hardware encoder so it really shouldn't
matter as long as we have enough GPU performance at least according to our
findings um on this topic
i guess that was two or three years ago for our power supply we actually
downgraded in a certain sense compared to the minecraft server that we built
this is Corsair's sf750 and it's a 750 rather than an 800 watt
unit but unlike those silverstone units we used before
this has dual 8 pin eps connectors which
both our AMD and Intel HDD platforms
require we're just going to mount it fan side up so that it gets to suck in some
of the air that's being blown over the system by these 80mm cooling fans
and we're going to go ahead and use the same mounting screws once again to
actually plug the power supply in though we've got to go ahead and run this right
angle power connector through the hole in the back of the chassis
then we get our plug correctly installed on the outside
just pull up the power supply plug the right angle connector in make sure the
power supply is powered on because we're not really going to be
able to get that switch later oh and actually no it's not that hard to get it nevermind so we're going to leave it off
because that's a little bit safer when you're still building the computer and
then we can go ahead and screw this down to be very clear guys we know that this
isn't server spec hardware and i keep calling it a server a server is more of
a function and it will be serving a server role
even if it's desktop or workstation class hardware need to plug in usb for
our fan controller
then we're going to run our SATA connector around the power supply here
which is sort of a weird cable management choice on the surface
but it allows us to plug just a basic SSD
there we go in response to the onslaught of comments
that i'm sure are coming over my double-sided tape drive mounting there's
nothing wrong with it with a hard drive yes
bad idea with an SSD they're lightweight there's no moving
parts it's fine that leaves fixing up the
water cooling tubes as my last task here
the outlet from our reservoir is this one over here so we're going to run that
over to our graphics card which is a non-direction sensitive block
so we're going to go ahead and cut this off to size
we're going to be off to the races pretty quick here
that's what we're looking for move them bubbles through thank you
thank you kindly wow you actually you
set this up all like real nice for me and everything it's got the the file all
sitting there ready to just press and code the only thing you didn't include
was a SATA cable i didn't include a SATA cable what it's okay don't worry don't
worry i found a super stylish one check this out
oh no this is like i did that to myself that's
so bad oh man i think we should just leave it in there oh yeah heck yeah on
my side we've got Intel's flagship 10980xe that's an 18 core processor
along with a matching 1080 ti the same os and media encoder is ready to start
this test so uh you ready to lose i mean probably win
you're going down you're going down brah you're going down you're definitely
probably going to win all right ready three two one
go so what is this this is a cineform to h.264 transcode yeah so it's taking the
raw output from one of our editor stations so it's gonna be like a 50 60
Gigabyte file and transcoding it to h.264 so we can actually upload it to
youtube our previous rendering server probably would have done this video in
about 20 minutes so i think i'm gonna be beating that time
uh my estimated time remaining is 10 26 how about you uh i'm one minute into it
estimated remaining time is 14. oh it's going down to 13 but i mean it's adobe
so it's all over the place yeah fair enough what's your RAM usage like
uh i'm at 16 gigs yeah basically 16 gigs
as well CPU usage is somewhere between
60 to 70 percent wow uh mine's at like 45 50.
um what about GPU my is kind of chilling
bounces between 10 and 20 percent oh i'm like
pretty much always below 10. in turn
six to nine everyone quiet quiet
up Jake mine was too fast it was too fast i
finished 15 seconds ago what
yeah you heard me i still have four minutes remaining
yeah you got wrecked then didn't you 12 minutes 42 seconds oh
for comparison i'm at 14 minutes and there's still three minutes remaining
that's crazy and the funny thing is like yeah it's got you know
whatever 80 more cores but its usage was
so low like it must just also be more efficient at encoding on a per core
basis well here let me connect let me connect to our existing one and see if
it's even done yet because i bet you it's not yeah okay so our existing
server which is running it right now elapsed so far it's been 18 and a half
minutes and there's 30 seconds left so it looks like about a 19 minute encode
and then this one should be about 17 minutes so there was a little
improvement going from the 7980xc to the 10980xe but the 3970x just
wipes the floor with them that's really impressive so thanks for watching guys
if you enjoy these kinds of server videos maybe check out our recent
storage server upgrade deploying mnemonic it was sort of a nightmare but
it was also a lot of fun