$4,000 Server Chassis Holds 8 DUAL SLOT VIDEO CARDS! - HOLY $H!T
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,568 words · ~12 min read
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on episode five of holy sh we've got a
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computer case so epic that it had to be
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delivered on a pallet rather than via
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normal means so of course we've brought with us the only tool suitable to open
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such a thing chopsticks
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the GTX 980 TI VR Edition from EVGA
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provides an industry-leading Graphics experience as well as a 5 and a/4 inch
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Bay with easy access inputs for your VR device learn more at the link in the
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video description okay well that was obviously
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completely stupid let's go with the more traditional knife to open this baby up
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so inside this box is actually more than
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just a computer case in fact there's a
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case a power supply and a motherboard yes my friends
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this is the first time we've ever had a chance to check out one of super micro's
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barebones server units that they sell
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but this one is very special one that I
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wish I'd known about a month ago when I was trying to do the seven Gamers 1 CPU
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project and the only way that I could figure out to put seven graphics cards
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into a single computer was to water cool the whole blood with all this like
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custom nonsense and I had to find the one motherboard on Earth that would work
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etc etc etc no my friends there was an
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easy way to do it all along all I had to
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do was get one of these bad
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boys oh cool they actually like pre-modded it for me so let's let's pull
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this out let's pull this out check this out check this
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out oh yes my friends yes my friends
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that is exactly what it looks like the
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entire rear of a foru chassis taken up
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entirely by expansion slots all right my
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friends so let's take a quick tour of
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this absolute Beast of a monster this is
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I'm going to read it off it the super micro 4027
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gr- t which actually which actually
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isn't the right thing they told me they were sending the trt the one with the 10
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GB network interface built and maybe
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they included like an upgrade module or something so first of all this is cool
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it includes four 1,600 wat power supplies yes
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friends that is for all kinds of crazy power delivery along with redundancy
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which is important in any kind of a server environment you can see there are
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these tiny slim little units here let's
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uh let's see if we can read this baby yeah this is the DPS 1600 CB uh so the
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output is actually 1,600 Watts max if oh
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this is interesting I have never seen a discrepancy like that before so at 120
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volt input it's 1,000 Watts Max and at 240 volt input it is 1,600 Watts
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Max very very interesting so I'm going
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to have to make sure I run this baby on 240 volt input but in the meantime let's
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see if super micro included like an upgrade module kit or something like
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that uh these are our rails these are
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those really nice rails that I like so we're going to go ahead and rail mount this baby in the rack and then in here
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I'm hoping to find
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um well nothing
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apparently uh
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okay uh okay well let's open it up then
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I guess oh but first no a tour of the
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front so there's more to this there are
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more tricks up this Baby's sleeves than just a bunch of video cards so This
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Server will actually be taking the place of two servers because in addition to
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accepting up to eight dual slot video cards it can also handle with these 2
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and 1/2 in sleds 24 ssds so this will be
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completely taking over wanic server duties in addition to being the new
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output render station that we never actually properly finished because we
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were trying to combine that one's duties with our inest station and that ended up
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causing instability issues due to different versions of Adobe Premiere
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from different years operating at same time long story anyway it was kind of
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ugly and we are looking for a better way to do this so tooless uh top it looks
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like let's find out if we can get this baby off oh no we need to unscrew some
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things so it's only it only pretends to be
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tooless check out this modification that
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spoiler is actually there for a reason and I will explain it in a little while
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here oh yes that that is
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fun so uh here let's try and let's try
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and sort these babies out a little bit see what we got see what we got going on
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here so this motherboard
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supports two LGA 20113 CPUs so we're
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going to be putting our two 18 core 2699 v3s in here for a total of 36 cores and
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on top of that it supports a total of 12
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dim slots you can see they were testing it they had uh looks like 16 dims in
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here before they sent it to me so 12 dim slots per CPU for a total of
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244 dim slots that means with the 32 gig
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dims that Kingston sent us for seven Gamers one CPU we could
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put 32 time 24 whatever that works out
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too inside here this is another really
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cool feature that I wish would make its way to the desktop check out these
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fans these are uh no these are not the
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counter spinning fan so these are just regular old 92 mm fans except for one
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thing do you notice that I just pulled it out where was the
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connector servers have had this forever
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hot swap fan so you just thunk them in and boom look at this you've got little
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slots all over the place here for all these different fan connectors check
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this out and you can see they've actually got two stacks of them one in
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front of the other in order to give these puppies pretty much unlimited
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static pressure so they're pulling all that ventilation in uh from these holes
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in the front here whoop hold on oh try not to drop this from these holes in the
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front here as well as through where
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those SSD mounts go so they got to have a ton of static pressure because these
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puppies are not just you know cooling some run-of-the-mill computer we're
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talking 36 processing cores a bunch of RAM and up to yes this is where life
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gets really interesting up to eight
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graphics cards 1 2 3 4 1 2 three four
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Each of which can be dual slot and then in addition to that it can handle
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another three expansion cards of whatever type you desire so I actually
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guess nothing would prevent you from putting 10 in here if you really really
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wanted to which is um which is sort of
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sort of bananas so let's go ahead and uh see what it'll look like with all those
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installed okay you want to come with me while I go retrieve graphics cards all
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right so uh let's pick some video cards shall we let's go with uh what do we got
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here I don't know some kind of 290 or 390 or something all right what else we
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got here ooh a GTX 580 sure thing no
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problem what else we got gtx980 yeah
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let's take one of those and uh ooh a GTX
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780 Ti that sounds pretty good we got a good uh good representation of the
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market share of these two graphics card companies all right take these back and
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get them installed don't trip one really
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cool thing I want to point out before we get any further in though is that most
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of what you see up here is actually just
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like like a like a dummy board like this is like a daughter board it's not
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there's not a ton of logic on it actually um it installs into the
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motherboard which is below see down here
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using it looks like four hard PCB
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bridges down here and then that's what does all the controlling so it's
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actually all mapped out for you so here's CPU 1 here's CPU 2 and then all
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of these are labeled right here so this is cpu1 slot one PCIe 3.01 16x cpu1 slot
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10 okay well numbering doesn't make a ton of sense to me so far but it goes 1
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10 9 8 uh uh 7 six 5 anyway so it says CPU 1
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cpu2 and it's all kind of spelled out for you like that so let's start
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installing video cards AMD and
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NVIDIA living together in Perfect
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Harmony I don't know how that song goes but I think you guys get the reference I
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don't even know if I'm going to be able to find enough video cards to fill this thing up this ridiculous okay so before
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we put any more in I want to take a short break and give you guys a better
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appreciation of the scale of what we're dealing with here this is a normal ATX
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motherboard it can fit four graphics cards total if you include one here and
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if you install one in the very bottom slot and have it overhang the bottom of the board so it look a little something
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like that this is what we're dealing with
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here it's ridiculous so let's keep the
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Ridiculousness up let's put some more graffics CS in let's put one here wow
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that's a long card but it fits just fine
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let's put one here let's put one
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here oh balls this is a stupid modified
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one from scrapyard Wars that I'll just
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move it see it's not a standard width but that's okay there's so many
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different spots for graphics cards server stuff all about that convenience
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no PCI Express locks you want to pull a card out boom you pull it out no big
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deal right
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there okay lonus but what about that
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thing you promised us before you said you'd explain why this thing is a
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freaking humpback whale now just because we can install you know 69 90s like
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crazy long cards like this doesn't mean
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that you can install anything you want in a system like this and we are
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somewhat Limited in terms of the height of our graphics cards because one of the
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U's so U is your vertical vertical
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measurement of height for a system like this one of the U's is taken up by all
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those power supplies here at the back with only three left for graphics cards
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that means any cards that are taller than standard are not going to fit
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within that 4u enclosure size what that
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also means is that any cards that are
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designed with their power plugs coming out of the top of the card like this
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would interfere with a flat top panel which is why we got this modified
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humpback one there we go that is going to take up
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a little bit of space above our server so let's go ahead and make sure that
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that actually fits okay yes that fits
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perfectly with all of our graphics cards
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love it so we've got big plans for this thing we're going to be doing a video
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where we explore uh who makes the best GPU for video encoding in Premiere so
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we're going to do like an AMD versus NVIDIA to head and show a bunch of
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different classes of GPU find out if you even need a super powerful one we're
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going to be doing one where we have eight game streams running off of a
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single machine at a time that is going to be flipping sick and finally we are
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going to be maybe actually you guys let me know if you want to see this but
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maybe doing a Showcase of the final build that I do in here with the 24 ssds
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maybe it'll be like a follow-up holy episode rather than a normal release uh
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with all the ssds as well as all the graphics cards that we end up putting
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and get hacking building and repairing today well not quite today they do have
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to ship it to you but very soon so thank you for checking out this
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episode of holy sh our new 36 core 8 GPU
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machine don't forget if you enjoyed this video then like it but if you disliked
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probably wondering gee what should I watch next hm great question maybe you
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should go check out the previous episode of holy where we took some like dish
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