welcome to the ultimate distributed computing build log we do tons of build
logs and build guides that are mostly not entirely but mostly for people
building gaming PCs and trust me this computer will rock games this build log
however will have a bit of a different tune to it the idea of this build is for
it to be a distributed computing Powerhouse for folding at home and boink
but before we get into the build itself I'm sure some of you are wondering what
folding at home and boink even are both of these programs are largely trying to
answer questions or solve various problems that are negatively affecting
many people in the world today folding at home is focusing on Alzheimer's
disease Huntington and Parkinson's amongst many other different forms of
cancer boink also looks to research cures for various diseases but has
options for other projects as well like discovering pulsars working on
mathematical proofs and many many more
these programs are able to work on these various interesting projects by
Distributing the workload amongst many users those users computers are
essentially donating their performance and their houses power to accomplish
great things this whole build will be about pushing the limits and the CPU was
no exception the core i7 5960x 8 Core
Extreme Edition processor from Intel is the best of the best of any Enthusiast
grade chips available today so I went with that both these programs can run on
basically any semi-modern desktop processor but this is an ultimate build
so extreme Edition it is now we could have fairly easily chosen any x99
motherboard but when ASUS heard what we were planning they wanted to step up and
in a rock solid way they did the heart touching ASUS Republic of Gamers Rampage
5 extreme x99 motherboard is one hell of a hookup and it fits this build in a
multitude of ways first up it looks fantastic and a black and red aesthetic
that will match the rest of the build it has a sexy Republic of Gamers LED in the
middle of the board and a nice IO cover that will look great along with the
black PCB that we've come to expect from Republic of Gamers boards second and I
guess arguably more important is the board stability this board has quality
components everywhere and wonderful copper based heat pipes under those
attractive heat sinks it's one hell of a board is it Overkill uh yes definitely
for our case we'll be using the newly released noctis 450 which appears to be
a wicked mix between the h440 and the NZXT Phantom line of cases the outer
aesthetic of this case uses a mixture of aggressive lines solid panels and
meshing to create a performance look it also features underglow lighting which
you would normally have to mod in yourself a great touch now is probably a
good time to point out that there are two different versions of the noctis 450
one in black and red that I chose and another in blue and white if you want a
different color palette than I did venturing through the trapezium or
trapezoid side panel we reveal what appears to be the inside of an h440 this
is a noctus series case not a hush series case so rather than including
noise dampening foam as they did with the h440 they added in a treat for the
more raw performance-minded folks out there by upgrading the fan controller to
an awesome pwm controlled module this is where things started to get really fun I
couldn't exactly pass up ASUS on their awesome motherboard offer but as you can
probably tell this is an ITX matx and ATX case and the board is definitely
extended ATX back to the drawing board you say no we can make this work here at
lus Media Group finding solutions to problems that most people would simply
avoid entirely is a daily occurrence with barely a second thought I decided
to just go for it the case does angle up on the right side before the board ends
but not actually enough to make it actually Bend so Full Speed Ahead the
board does touch the rubber gromet and ultimately cover them up which is a
shame because they definitely would come in handy for cable management but not
the end of the world cuz I could just rote my cables through the nicely spaced
Drive cages for cooling I installed the 2x 140 mm NZXT Kraken x61 the n450 can
fit up to 3x 120 mm coolers or a 2X 140
mm cooler now I know the white fans that come with the x61 kind of hurt the
overall aesthetic but never fear they will be hidden by the top panel once
installed the tubing for the cooler conflicting with the Shroud on the
motherboard's io did cause a bit of a tight fit but never fear again the
install worked out just fine without the need for any modifications folding at
home and boink don't really seem to care much about what RAM they have so we
didn't go quite to the overkill level in this area if we were building this PC
solely for the purpose of distributed computing even 8 GB of RAM would have
been enough but we went with 16 GB of hyperx Fury ddr4 modules which should
have have us covered for a wider range of tasks for the power supply enzen XT
hooked us up again with a 1200 W hail 90 V2 which will ensure that we won't run
out of power even under pretty heavy load the power supply slides into the
back of the case after being attached to the thumb screw based support bracket
similar to how you install a power supply on an h440 again the power supply
is white which doesn't quite go with our theme aesthetic but it hides under the
Fantastic included basement in the case so it's not really a big deal since
folding and boink really don't need much in the way of storage capacity or speed
it's common for these machines dedicated to these tasks to have fairly non-im
Storage Solutions we went with a solution that would hold many a Gamers
Library two of these 960 gigaby ssds from Kingston that lonus had on hand for
an upcoming server project that he's working on if you're building a dedicated rig for folding or boink don't
worry about your drive so much but if you do plan on doing other things with
your computer like gaming or using it as a work station PC a fast system Drive is
awesome now the graphics cards for this system are really fun auss hooked us up
again with a beast Matrix 290x which features some sick looking black heat
pipes and will just generally look great amongst all the other black and red
components in this build while doing extremely well for distributed computing
projects next up is the Titan X now I
know I know obviously I can't link these two together but boink has different
projects that work for either Cuda on the NVIDIA side or Cal on the AMD side
and while the rest of the build is so insanely Overkill it felt like a shame
to limit to one or the other so I said to myself why not both now the Titan X
is sure to crush through projects as well but it has that crazy green on the
side which just will not do while thinking of ways to fix this problem in
a simple and slightly ridiculous way as is the lonus Media Group style I noticed
some of Brandon's gaffer's tape was a similar color to the black on the tight
neck after cutting a strip to size and trying to get the angles right it looked
pretty cool but not quite 100% there I
took some of the black spray paint that lonus had left over from a previous mod
that Brandon had suggested to me and decided to use the gaffer's tape like
reverse painters tape painting the gaffer's tape to be black instead of
gray and then placed it back on the card I definitely wouldn't say that it's a
perfect solution but honestly for an inexpensive and easy to implement
solution it looks really good and isn't even necess necessarily recognizable if
you aren't looking for it then all that was left was just to plug everything in
that wasn't already plugged in and quickly touch up the cable management
mostly by shoving everything I could into the basement compartment and then
strapping down whatever I couldn't shove into there with some of the many zip tie
loops on the back of the motherboard tray now we're up and running I
installed Windows really quick on our raid zero the machine looks beautiful
and it's time to get started contributing to some projects I'd like
to note that I didn't overclock anything on the system this may change however
and I don't recommend anything against overclocking especially when you're
contributing to projects like folding at home and boink but it is also very
important to note that you should be careful when setting up a system like
this as I plan to run this setup full bore 24/7 sometimes when people verify
overclocks they're fairly lazy about it and will often test things for 10 or 30
minutes if you plan to have a setup like this I would be as thorough as possible
verify that overclock for at least 24 hours first up we have folding at home
which happens to be the biggest distributed computing team for lonus Tech tips currently sitting in 25th
Place overall for points fourth place for current active users and has amassed
over 3,500 users in just over 2 years
Bravo guys Bravo we are one of the fastest growing folding teams in the
world and it's damn impressive now to set up folding at home in a simple and
quite easy way simply download your respective installer install it by
spamming next and Away you go the problem with this however is that there
may be some residual issues from not configuring it properly as you can see
with my 290x and tight NE they're happily running away doing your thing
but on cam on the left hand side you can see that our 29x for example it's
running at about high 80% in terms of load and coming in at about 83° C that
seems pretty good but it's not as fast as the card can go and I expect more out
of it than that but the issues do not stop there our 5960x has failed its work
order and is not producing any results currently which is a huge loss to
optimize folding at home you require some configuration and yes you can just
change the folding power slider that will likely be enough but you really
need to optimize things I highly suggest you check out the lineus tech tips
forums for tips and details on how to set up folding at home in an optimal
Manner and the same is true with boink folding at home will just pick protein
folding projects for you with boink you need to sign up for projects on your own
and then get work orders from those specific projects due to the sheer
amount of things you can do in boink there's a lot of different configurations tips so again check them
out on the Forum after getting this machine fully optimized I'll let it run
folding it home for a while before shifting over to boink and optimizing
again because these projects are better seen over time I would suggest that you
check out the progress links in the description to see just how my machine
and the team as a whole are doing there are Parts in here that need to go into
future projects so unfortunately this machine won't be running forever but
I'll try to get some serious work done with it while I can thanks for watching
the ultimate distributed computing build blog I hope you can enjoy some of the
Glam of this awesome looking black and red disease and various world problem
fighting machine as always thanks to everyone involved especially our title
sponsor NZXT for making this build possible be sure to check out the
pricing and discussion thread in the link in the video description if you're
interested in where you can pick up the noctis 450 case as well as all the other
parts we used in this build thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time