So the other day Jake was talking to annoying client and about, you know, what he wants his
PC to be like. And at some point in time, they decided that instead of being
in, you know, a normal PC case, this would be a build that would take us, you
know, a day, maybe three, they want a pyramid PC case. So we're going to have
to custom make it using, you know, steel tubing just like this one right here.
This should be the last of the supplies that we need for this build right here.
But holy crap, do we have a lot of to do. It's what 2:30 on a Monday and by
Friday we want for the frame to be built, the parts to be ordered and like
a test fit to be totally complete. So, let's take a look at what we've got
going on over here. So, I just mocked this up. This is basically what we're
thinking. We need, you know, probably three GPUs. There's only one in here
right now, but that's fine. You get the basic idea of what I'm going for. This
is going to be tricky to bend. And along all of the outside, there's going to be
Illuminati stuff, I guess. Let's get started.
In about 15 minutes or so, we're not going to be able to change any of this.
We're going to start cutting and welding and so on. So, if there's any thoughts
that you have, now is the time to, you know, speak.
How big is the base? Base is 26 in.
26 in. Can I have a measuring ruler?
measuring ruler. That's still pretty big, isn't it?
Yep. Do you think the client's going to be okay with that?
I think he's going to have to be. He asked for a pyramid, and this is about as small as a pyramid can get. Like, if
you look at this here, there are a lot of spaces, but not a lot of space that
you can put useful things. Like, we're losing so much space just kind of like
down in here because it's a triangle. It's a dumb shape.
Well, the customer is always right. Yep. He asked for this. We're going to
give it to him for better or for worse. There are really three things that you
need for a good weld to happen. So, the first is just wellprepared parts. So,
these right here I've, you know, ground and cut and also wiped with isopropyl
alcohol. So, they should be nice and clean. You also need the knowledge of
how to weld. So, I took a couple welding classes several years ago. But three,
maybe the biggest one is practice, which I don't have. I did a tiny bit of
practice here yesterday. Some of them turned out good, some of them did not. I
haven't really touched a TIG welder in like three, four years. I guess this is
the practice that we're going to get here. Whatever. Can all be solved with a
bit of persuasion, probably some angle grinding. It's not going to be fun for
me, but at the same time, we just got to
do it.
When you're welding, you're basically just melting two pieces of metal. And if
that molten metal gets exposed to the air, really bad things happen. So, a
pretty good example of that is here. I
still had some good old shielding gas. We're using argon. And this weld looks
fine. Come over here when it started
running out. Doesn't look quite as good. Overall
though, it's starting to come together. All that we have to do are make the bits
that go, you know, from here up to here.
So, what we have to do for that is use
the cobra miter daddy.
Basically, the miter daddy is just this, you know, nice piece of CNC. I believe
it's aluminum that you're able to chuck up in the mill and then set it at kind
of whatever angle you want. Then you have your piece of stock. Just goes in
here like so. You tighten that down and then you take your hole saw, which I
actually haven't even taken out of the package yet. Drill down to give yourself
whatever angle you want. The angles that we need to hit for this
all to go together is like half a complex one, which is where the good old
angle cube is just incredible. So, you
see it's totally level here on the vice.
And then we're able to take that, set the
angle in this plane. It's supposed to be
26.4. So, come on. It's not quite there.
Good enough for now. And then in the other way, it needs to be 42°.
So, that's right about right about there. Now, with those two angles,
after we tighten it down in 3D, this should be in the correct spot.
Let's not look too closely at the welds here, but you know, the whole things
together. I imagine even if they're not the prettiest, they're going to be
pretty strong. And I think I learned a lot about welding them. There's kind of
like a you can see here where there's just a lot of weld. I sort of blew a
hole through it. And then in stitching it back together, I feel like I really
learned how to TIG weld pretty well. So here's the basic frame, but we need to
be able to put like the motherboard and the power supply and everything in it.
And normally I would do that sort of thing out of aluminum, but I'm concerned
like one about corrosion with just it touching the steel, and two, we need to
ship it somewhere and it might just pull out. I've seen horrific things happen to
PCs and shipping. So, we're going to try and use steel. You want to come over
here, Andy? Been running a couple little tests on the good old router here with
cutting steel. And I think I've come up with some pretty successful settings.
So, let's try and cut some steel on the router. It's a bit more tricky than you
might expect because although there are a lot of calculators out there, they're
normally based off of something, you know, kind of like the big old Bridgeport here where the limiting
factor isn't the rigidity of the machine, but just simply, you know, the
power of the motor and how much metal it can mow through. That said, this has
been quite successful. I like my test cuts that I have here. And I don't know,
let's cut out some back panels, motherboard panels, and everything.
Heat
up
here.
So the power supply and motherboard mounting panel is cut and in. And the
original plan was to have these supports that went up to this like crossmember
attached to that and then attached to
the power supply support. But I just don't really like how it looks. So
instead, I'm thinking that it can come in here and kind of exist flush to the
support. The only problem is that it looks like it might interfere with where
the power supply is going to be. So, we're going to have to test that out and
see if it actually fits in. Oh man,
I should have just not showed anyone this and said this was the plan from the
beginning. Oh, this is going to be totally fine. Heaps of space for the
motherboard. And you're probably wondering right now, uh, GPUs can't go
here because power supply, but that's because we have these wonderful PCIe
extenders from Camino. So, you probably saw them in the Camino RM video that we
have, but they look like this. This is the end that the GPU will be on. And on
the other side, we have just this little
guy here. So that slots in just like so.
And then our data is carried over these cables here. So the plan is for our GPUs
to be mounted right up here on the same plane as this
like panel that's going to be here. And we'll cut a nice big hole in it so that
you can see all three of them just in
all of their glory. to support them. I stole this PCIe bracket from an InWin
case. It came with two of them. I'm not sure why, but makes my life way easier.
So, you'll be able to put four GPUs right in there. We'll only have three,
but like upgrading is cool. I think it's going to be sweet for this to not look
dumb. A really crucial part is that the GPUs have to be at the correct angle. I
could grab it from Solid Works, but who knows what exactly it is. So, we're just
going to come in here. got this wonderful angle finder thing. I absolutely love these things. And it is
50.25° or 52.5°.
Hey, Lis, do you want to see a computer? Oh, I'd love to.
So, this is what we have so far. This is actually not bad. Yeah,
given the uh initial plans that I saw,
this greatly exceeds my expectations. Yeah, I was kind of concerned that it
would just be garbage if I'm honest. The only thing is the GPUs need to go in and
we have a bit of a problem. They need to be like placed correctly.
So if you kind of look here, um we have conveniently two plates here.
Uhhuh. So that you can easily access them cuz it's going to be just an absolute pain
if you couldn't do that. So they're going to be going in something like this. And it needs to be
positioned something like that. The only problem is I can't weld this in and make
sure it looks correct at at the same time. Oh, so you brought me for that? Yeah.
Okay. So, what we're looking at here is a Threadripper 32 core processor,
probably 256 gigs of RAM because the client is insane. Uh, he has no need for
it whatsoever, but you can't talk reason with him, you know. He just wants to
flex, right? So, we're going to have either 1500 or probably a 1500 watt CIC,
right? That one. Yep. Okay. So, the GPUs
are all going to be like sitting here in the pyramid and basically we're going to
have like an Illuminati eye here in the
front and there's going to be like that's going to
be like a window and it's going to look onto four quadro GPUs because again the
client has an unlimited budget and you can't talk sense into them. So, the
customer is always right except when they're wrong and you just have to do
what they say anyway, right? Yeah. I was thinking like we originally
said we were going to do three, I think, cuz it just makes more sense.
Yeah. Cuz then you can do NVL link and then
like a Quadro 4 display, which is ridiculous, but at least kind of makes sense, but I
think it's going to look so much better if you have four of them. Like just the
window and four GPUs right there. So, am I just eyeballing this or what?
Well, one one second here. One second here, Mr. Lionus. So, first of all, do
you think this is fine? Right now, I have it mounted in three spots, like for
the motherboard. We can pretty easily add in some stuff out here. It's
probably not necessary. I don't think it's necessary. By the time you put a motherboard on it, that
will also serve to add extra rigidity. I really don't think it's a problem.
Yeah. And like this is thick. Yeah, I think it's fine. Are the panels
actually going to go on here? The plan is to just stand it off like an
inch or so. Mhm. So, there's going to be a gap along
each side. Then, we have a steel mesh that goes
along here. You sort of tack weld that on and then super glue some magnets to
it. So, you put like the side panel on.
Mhm. It has the gap that for one is going to look cool and allow for air flow and
also allow for us to just ignore that this is not square.
Yeah. And then you have the sweet mesh below it and it's going to be great.
So, we just pull a Tesla. We're like, "Yeah, the gap is a feature." Yeah.
Okay. So, now we need those in here.
Oh, this is awesome. Oh my god, that
seems terrible. The key to a good weld is making sure that you have a good
position. This is This is not
All right. Do you want to come look at the alignment? You didn't even check it before we went.
It's probably fine. What do you think? Yeah, seems good to me.
Cuz we've got enough. I kind of checked. I made sure this line was parallel with
this one. And then here, there's enough clearance for them to pop out if we
really need to. Yep. I think it's okay. Actually, with this
tacked in place, we've actually got a pretty good look at what the finished system is going to look like in terms of
the internal layout. So, I think we're going to get away with adding one more
fan here. So, we're going to have a total of eight fans. The whole frame is
going to be on feet here. So, these fans are going to be able to suck air up
through filters. Yeah. Through filters. Uh, so we're going to
have filtered intakes coming in on the bottom and then passive exhaust out
these vents that are going to go down the uh the corners of our pyramid. And
then for the uh cooler, we were going to
use that thermosiphon prototype, right? Yeah. Now that I'm looking at it here,
uh, looks a little ky. I don't think it's going to fit.
Yeah, we might end up with something else. So, okay, we're going to have some kind of cooler over here. And then
graphics is here. And because storage is going to be just M.2s on the
motherboard, you don't actually have to account for any additional storage. I
mean, really, it's just the only reason this is going to take up a two foot by
twoft space on this person's desk is
because they want a pyramid computer.
Oh, that's the table, not the computer, right? Yeah, the table's really not square.
It's actually pretty good. If you guys are enjoying this build so
far, maybe you'll enjoy I don't know. Should we throw it to one of our sleeper PCs? Sure.
Yeah, sure. Actually, let us go to the playlist. Play playlist of sleeper PCs.
Yeah, they're sick. And get subscribed. It's Alex's Jank Engineering at its
finest. Yeah, the workshop's going away for
construction in a week, so part two will be very soon. Actually, yeah, we have to get part two
done or we will never get it done. And then our client will be very sorely
disappointed.