so you might have noticed it's been a while since i've talked about the oh
the hundred thousand dollar pc and i'm approximating the cost because i
actually don't know exactly how much it's going to end up coming to yet
because they're still a few things that are to be determined
about the final configuration
but there's a good reason for all of that i've been waiting on some really
important hardware to continue my testing so right now we've got a problem
with the current configuration this motherboard can accept a measly
seven pci express 16x devices i mean
what kind of chump nonsense is that for a hundred thousand
dollar computer that i aim to have six video editors editing 8k footage off of
at the same time so i got in touch with uh actually a
couple of really special companies one of them is thermaltake who
sent over a bunch of their pci express extenders i'm going to use these
to test running a bunch of graphics cards off of this thing without water
blocking them all up beforehand which is what i did last time
which was super stupid because then when i had issues it was it was a nightmare
and this this
is actually a bunch of boxes from a company called one stop systems who if
you're not in the enterprise space you've probably never heard of but if
you are even then you might not have heard of them and they make
pci express extension solutions
allowing you to take a single slot and adapt it to in this case
eight slots how does that work
well we're gonna find out not cheaply though
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check out the link below to learn more so the funny thing about these guys was
when i got in touch with them um the bloke that i spoke with was actually
a fan of the channel he was like super into working with us and he was like
yeah let me let me carry this up the chain and then i i spoke with his
manager and she wasn't as familiar personally but then her husband was
apparently super into Linus tech tips and she was like okay yeah no you know
this sounds this sounds great we'd love to work with you and then
i followed up and they basically said yeah everything's shipped
but i hadn't actually worked out what i needed or really talked to them about it
much yet so i'm not a hundred percent sure
what's here yet so we're gonna find out together
i did know this board was coming so they've actually got a bunch of
different pci express expansion products even you can get like chassis that allow
you to plug something from the back of one computer into the back of another
one that looks like a computer but it's actually just a box full of pci express
expansion or you can get a bare bones board which
it would appear is what they've sent to me but i'm not a
hundred percent sure how or if
any of it is going to work so this guy
right here is their hiv 35 x4 this is a
pci express x4 2
cable adapter so this is going to go into our
system and is going to adapt a pci express slot
to a cable that we can plug into the back of the system this is pci express
over a cable i'm not talking like you know Thunderbolt i'm talking pure full
capability pci express trippy stuff
right look at this connector
oh that feels good we're turning the one pci express slot
on the other end here into one two three four four eight more
eight more pci express slots five eight
pin power connectors and a 24 pin what
are they expecting you to plug into this thing honestly what they're doing
is not that unusual
in fact your motherboard you watching
right now your motherboard probably has similar technology because you're
probably aware already if you've followed our CPU reviews that especially
mainstream cpus don't have a ton of pci
express lanes on them so then how exactly is it that you end up with you
know four 16x slots and a bunch of PCIe 4x
slots when your CPU only has like 20 to 24 lanes
well the way that they do that is using what's called a plx chip so these are
effectively think of them as kind of like a network switch where you take one
Ethernet connection and you split it out to eight computers for pci express so
this is going to be a very high end pci express switcher chip and then you're
going to find those same kinds of adapters on here so that allows all of
this traffic to share this one interface
now to be clear you're not going to be able to connect eight 16x
graphics cards and get the full performance out of all them at exactly
the same time but i'm planning to use it for usb 3. something where with six
editors not everyone's going to be slamming it at exactly the same moment
so it should work fine
and just knock on wood till you until your knuckles are raw
right there was another piece of hardware that i needed to continue my testing so we
only have a couple of optane pci express ssds in the building so what i wanted
was to swap out my 750s for these and have a look at what vm performance looks
like running on optane raid1 the other
thing i was waiting for cable mods sent over some pci express power
connectors that i'm going to need to extend the cables for these graphics
cards that i'm going to be running on extensions
i just found the most perfect spot for it you guys never would have believed
that i didn't know exactly what i was doing here so
i've got the the host adapter installed on the other
side i throw in a second power supply here and then check this out
oh no
now that could work man we'd have to like pull this panel
off and maybe like laser cut them or something but we could have all our usb
ports right on the back of the system like that anyway for today though this
is just this is just a dry dry run i'm going to bring it around the other side
so with this expansion daughter board we're going to have a total of
six remaining because i'm going to take up one of the PCIe slots with the host
card plus eight so that is 14 pci
express slots plus all the ones that i am adapting
from the u.2 plugs on the motherboard so
uh
is 18 pci express slots
just the right number creep 100 okay
let's get our PCIe power
and then let's hook up some graphics cards here
shall we we're just gonna do four graphics cards for today so some of the
editors are gonna get full 16x slots for their graphics cards and others are
going to be stuck with a little bit less but for the purposes of what we're doing
that's not going to affect performance in any meaningful way
so we're just going to pick some random slots here
and install some gpus baby so those will go there
sure so that'll go there
sure yeah um
i mean is it there does that work is that kind of reasonable we never claimed this video
wasn't gonna be madness you knew what you were clicking on
okay leaning tower of titans uh right
yeah what could go wrong
oh there we go okay that's one
i mean should we do a quick test to make sure this even works before we go any
further yeah okay all right
all right let's do it is this on
what the heck oh it turned off
let's give it one more try because if there's one slot that doesn't like a
graphics card or something like that being in it that's going to be a big
problem because i need to fill all of them with graphics cards ee
you know what i think it might be is our one stop systems expansion card
because i don't have the power supply plugged into the
target end of it yet so it might not like something about
what's going on here so let's try it with just the graphics card so we're not
changing too many variables at once here there it is
okay all right so while this is booting up
we need to go get ourselves another power supply and it can't be like some
wussy power supply it's got to have
i got to find out what kind of connectors these are these pci express
or the uh oh
oh crap they're not PCIe
oh man it's gonna be ghetto
so this is interesting of our five ax 1500 eyes
i apparently have three of them and then we also have a 1600i that Jake
apparently has checked out long term what does he what does he need a 1600 on
his test bench for okay let's go let's go
get one of the three axis that Jake has
so i have one on my bench i have one we have like five so yeah so i have one in
my no no i have one in my rig at home i have one in the desk pc
why would i not because it's so stupid you're stupid why do you have so much
crap here can you clean this up i mean it's working out for me right now
but in general okay
what did he do can you believe what Jake did to this
power supply you see this is why this is why i rage out at people for
like the way that they treat the hardware around here sometimes
what the whoa
you say this like you've never seen it before you're literally the only person
who's ever used it
and naturally the eps connectors aren't even in here thanks Jake
should i just fire him let me know in the comments
new plan Jake did find another 1500i
so we're just gonna use that this is the beauty of modular power
supplies because like how else would you have ended up being able to
frankenstein a regular desktop power supply to power this
weird board all we got to do is uh
what the hell is this
Jake just peel it off well i mean it makes it
look like there's something wrong with it
why did you put so much tape on it
it's fine
now i have no idea
what triggers this thing to turn on
here we go yeah let's get a bit of a better look at whoa
all right that's all looking peachy
uh editor don't include that these guys were very gracious to send us this stuff
and i don't want them to see that the bloke that i spoke with was actually a
fan of the channel now i do want to know if it's working so
here why don't we grab our octane drives and throw those on there and see what
happens obviously with something like a high-speed storage device we're not
expecting to get our full performance out of it in this kind of a situation
but i just want to know if it's working at all this is terrifying everything about this
is wrong let's take a picture for instagram
there they are there's the optane ssds just like that
basically plug and play you just have to make sure you actually plug all the
things may not look like much but she's got it where it counts kid right
gorgeous so our optane drives are being picked up
by the os nvme0n1 and
this is what i really need to know this is going to tell me if this whole thing
is going to work or not because if i can't pass through the controllers
individually then there's i'm not going to be able to get everything hot
pluggable look at all of these plx bridges here
that is madness
so the update is mostly bad news there is what's called an acs override
patch that you can enable to try to break
individual items that are in a single i o mmu group out into their own iomu
groups but as far as unraid knows the the code for the patch has been broken
since Intel sky lake and it doesn't seem to be working here
obviously this is much newer than sky lake but they have suggested that if we
shut this baby down pull the card out and put it in a
haswell or older system and see if that
works that maybe they could try fixing the
patch to work on sky lake and then it might work in this system so
that's our that's our first step here uh
well we're not running this for very long so we're just gonna
put that there yeah
okay yeah that seems pretty stable
all right so this is where we find out if the hack will potentially work with
our pci express splitter device one thing that's nice is how plug and play
this thing's been these ssds are both showing up perfectly just plugged into a
consumer board so that's pretty cool and honestly we
should still get some use out of it even if it just means that all of our usb
cards that we have plugged into it can't be passed through the vms it'll still be
nice to have all of those ports okay so i can't reach my contact at unread so
what i'm gonna do then is just throw some usb cards in here and see if
we can pass one through to something everything continues to get more ghetto
now we have ssds hanging off here
aren't they beautiful our renaissas usb controller is showing
up here that's one of the ones that's plugged into the daughter board but we still
don't know if the override worked so let's go ahead and let this populate
remember this doesn't tell us if we can get it working this tells us if maybe
we could get it working oh
this looks like a very big group so this
is all the plx style no they're all in the same group
damn it okay
it's not all bad we still get the benefits of using
a pci express switch for all our usb devices so everything that we do hook up
will be better managed and the whole thing does
work really seamlessly i had just really hoped for hot plug
and it looks like that might be out of my grasp however cool this hardware
might be
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so thanks for watching guys hopefully you enjoyed coming along for
what would normally be like a behind the scenes type of
troubleshooting for a project like this if you guys disliked this video you can
hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider
checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description as long as you don't plan to
use pci passthrough for the individual things you have
plugged into it for each one of your vms
just had a new thought wait
what if every single slot got its own daughter board with the GPU
and the usb on that okay that's probably a project for
another day let's just get the video editing working off this one system
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