The Water-Cooled Overclockable Server! What??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,900 words · ~14 min read
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is this your static safe CPU storage that is area
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so statically safe what is an insulator unless it's wet in which case it's not
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okay it's only like a thousand dollar CPU
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like realistically you're gonna drop it anyway so like so inside this box is one
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of the most bizarre products to ever land in our inbox i
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think both Jake and i had exactly the same reaction Gigabyte sends out this
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press release and they're like you guys we have water-cooled
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overclockable servers and we were both like we need that
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well no i think the first thing i said was but why
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i definitely just wanted it and if you do have that can we use it to replace
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our networked video transcode server
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so we are going to answer all of those questions and more
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okay uh who's taking it uh well i was just
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gonna here it's all you classic you take it i got it yeah yeah just go for it i
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believe in you okay that's not too bad
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so the first thing we notice about this
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after that it includes some handy toolless rails that's nice is that
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this is a one-u server
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so this is as slim as you would expect something like a like a a router or a
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network switch to be except that this thing can handle do i
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understand this correctly up to a 7900x
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7.7 gigahertz 7980xc or a 7980xe at they
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claim 4.6 gigahertz that
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is a lot of performance to squeeze into a form factor like this
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one so going over the outside of the server the first thing we notice is a
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really thin honeycomb mesh over here that's for pretty obvious reasons this
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thing's going to need some serious airflow we've got four those aren't
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supposed to be switched are these i did that you did that so this is just to
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look cool uh are they all open or some of them
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i think they're all say that yeah they're all satan all right it's so weird it's like they let someone like me
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onto their product team it says 2 times u.2 2 times SATA hot softball SSD base
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well there you go maybe they were color coded the back plane up here it's not
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all plugged in and there isn't enough cables to plug them in so all right well
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we'll have a we'll have a look at it here first we can check out the back so
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we've got one management port two gigabit network ports that was a little
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disappointing 10 gig would have been nice uh serial as well as vga and then
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these these are interesting check this out so if i were a betting
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man and someone said this is a 1500 watt power supply
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how many watts do you think this one is i would probably say something along the
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lines of well this is a per volume calculation i don't know 250 to 300 no
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no no this is an 1100 watt
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80 plus platinum power supply that is
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cooled by this fan and there's two they are
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redundant so in the event that one of them fails the system will continue to
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run and basically um i expect these to be incredibly loud
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wow what the hell
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there's 20 fans there's 20 i think these are like the 23
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000 RPM ones and these might be the trippiest radiators i've ever seen these
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are one new radiators and they're different sizes too this is definitely
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custom this is highly custom so let's have a look then at how this
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closed-loop cooler goes so check this out we can easily see what the flow path
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is going to be so cool water marked blue
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comes into our CPU where the pump is also located and then the hot water
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comes out goes to this radiator comes out of this one and then back around
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here and then cold goes back into the CPU so we're actually using both of
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these rads to cool just the CPU
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in terms of the rest of the specs we've got eight memory slots so that's quad
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channel we've got a single pci express
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slot which there is no obvious way to
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actually plug anything in
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so what we actually end up with is oh that's an interesting one
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another more different pci express slot
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that is broken out to two 16x slots up here
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installed sideways but then also into this 1x slot so wait where's the
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electrical signaling actually coming from is it this one i think it's that
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one yeah it must be this might be like power or just for stability like if
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you're going to build a custom board just for this server right you put the usb header somewhere you can actually
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like the south bridge what about all this space here if you try to put a GPU
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here it might even block yeah see that's so weird because so not only are we
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limited to half height pci express cards
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which is really going to affect our ability to upgrade networking
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or add a GPU to this thing up this is going to severely limit the
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length of the cards we can install as well when it really seems to me as an
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you know a relative lay person like this could have just been put over here like
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can you imagine being the engineer that gets given this assignment i'm sorry you
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want to build what uh yeah so if you could make a pcb that powers over
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twenty twenty three thousand RPM fans that
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would be great thanks excuse me why
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the power draws so gnarly that it has an eight pin is it eps look at this this is an 8-pin eps
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connector that that provides CPU power
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in the desktop systems for mere mortals those are good for 300 watts i think all
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right so what are we going with for CPU choice i think we're going to go with a
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7900 x so our current system has a 6950x
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almost dropped it there and this is also a 10 core so it should be kind of close
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in terms of performance although we're going to get the next generations improvements and then we're also going
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to get our overclock improvements because this is going to overclock
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better than that ugly water cooled now the weirdest thing about this
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configuration is this building a server with like
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Corsair gaming memory normally you would use ecc memory in a server because that
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way if there's a friggin solar flare and a bit flip or whatever it can
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automatically be corrected and the system can keep running without
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interruption but there's a couple of factors at play here one we're planning
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to overclock the bloody thing anyway it wasn't gonna be it wasn't going to be
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have the same kind of stability you'd expect from a normal server and two
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because we're running an overclockable core i9 processor it actually doesn't
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even have support for ecc memory so
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with that said we couldn't just choose any old gaming RAM because it doesn't
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fit it's even on like the exact same plane as this
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bracket here so it oh yeah just barely fits that's nuts i mean the funny thing
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about this too is that you can't see can you find thanks i've wanted
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overclockable servers for as long as i've been a computer enthusiast but now
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that someone actually made one i'm like experienced enough to know that
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it's not worth it not have been the greatest idea uh what is that so this is a 1050 ti had
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to do a little modification we took the shroud off but there's gonna be plenty
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of airflow so it shouldn't be a problem it's even got its own duct like it's
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perfectly fine all right so we're gonna have a slight issue here too so you gotta take this thing out to get it in
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here okay this connector is actually so close that it hits it and i'm going to
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have to bend it down while you stick the card in there it looks ghetto but it's
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really not that ghetto what oh no
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did i catch it i think i'm in no you're cutting oh oh
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but it's in oh god it's good enough it's great all right
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you win so we're gonna put a headless uh HDMI
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thing in here too so when we're remoting in you get the full resolution you know
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honestly i don't even feel that bad about our ghetto-ness here because if
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you look at like how the server was actually designed
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they literally just took like a piece of foam here
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and cut a hole in it i think that's like and put it there to keep the airflow
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going through the radiator that's not that jank it like it's like nice foam at
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least it's not like it's styrofoam yeah that's probably like electrically apple
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wouldn't do it this way oh well man if apple starts making servers again
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they're going to have dongles on their servers you're just going to see like a Thunderbolt hanging out of the front of
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the server with like you get your fiber line and your whatever like
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okay should we plug it in then so that's it yeah let's plug this up the top back
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on because i think the airflow is pretty important do i put this on the right way
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hold on i can do this i believe
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impressive taking your server for a walk yeah all right let's go we got to take
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care of them otherwise they get out of shape stuff
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okay so we just uh found a spare
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spot in our server room we're just gonna let it sit there yeah
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just slide it in there i mean the rails are really only designed for one server but
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like whatever yeah it's not like that's a really heavy one anyway
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that is really really loud like honestly here hold on can we close
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this door for a sec
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you can still hear it yeah even so clearly even with all the sound
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deadening that we put in this room which people mocked me for but actually works
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works phenomenally thank you but that pitch
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yeah it penetrates like i'm over by the green screen now
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that's an actual problem like yeah no i don't know if that's gonna
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okay it just dialed it back a little yeah
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okay right now it's fine so the process of overclocking this thing was actually
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kind of a nightmare but we're there and our CPU is running at a cool 4.7
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gigahertz now it wasn't actually that easy to get it here uh Gigabyte's manual
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for this server doesn't exist yet yeah and there's some extra steps so in
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addition to setting your core voltage and setting your uh CPU multiplier like
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you would overclocking on a desktop board you have to key some
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magic value so let's go ahead and hit it with a
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stress test 65 watts at idle
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not bad oh 69 69 yes not bad all right so let's start a
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stress test make sure she holds 100 utilization 4.7 gigahertz what kind of
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temperatures are we looking at 60 to 70 50 75 degrees
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heck yeah so we loaded some stuff on here we've
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got regular cinebench which we're going to run real quick here and by real quick
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i do mean literally real quick this should be very fast and then
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to address that cinebench has actually gotten to the point where very high-end
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processors run it too fast to
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use it as a reliable benchmark we've got the new unofficial what's it called
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cinebench extreme extreme we're going to try that out as well so kicking things
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off we got ourselves 2500 points
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which is pretty good now let's try extreme
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which is basically just four times the resolution this one first whoa look at
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those temps yeah they're starting to get up there
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that is quite the load
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wow we are above 90 degrees on a handful of
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course here you might say that this benchmark takes a hot minute okay i'll
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give you that one oh we did detect some overheating but our
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throttling percentage is zero and it finished so she seems to be just
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just holding on
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656 which i have no context for because this is a brand new benchmark i've never
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used before so why don't we go ahead and shut all of that down and let's do our
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uh our network network render okay so i got uh just
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down there that is one of adobe's sample files sure so we're just open up final
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one and we're gonna export this like we would in ltte video so the 60 megabit
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per second and then 75. cool at 4k
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and it is fully utilizing our CPU so one
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thing that we observed about our network render server way back when i had
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intended to use like 18 core xeons in it or something was that there's a limit to
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how many threads media encoder can actually use so it's better to have
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fewer higher clock threads than it is to have many many threads in a lot of cases
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which is how we ended up with an overclocked render server in the first
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place so this looks like it could be a viable
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replacement so the results are in and cinebench both cinebench and cinebench
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extreme gave us 20 increases in performance that's actually quite a bit
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more than i was expecting so the increase in clock speed is 17 and a half
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but it's still 20 so we're getting like what three percent increase ipc but then
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in premiere we actually got a 30
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uplift going from what is that thing having it
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a gtx 980 and a 6950x and a 6950x
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not freaking bad but the problem is it's
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loud the other problem is that this whole
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this whole experience still hasn't really enlightened us as to what that
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crap this thing's actually for so Jake intrepidly
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sent an email to Gigabyte asking them
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what is this for why does it exist why did you build an overclockable 1u server
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can't even put a GPU like it doesn't really have networking like what would
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you even use this for and the answer is
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the finance industry high frequency trading so you would take this server
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you need the highest possible frequent performance you need something that's
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air-cooled so it can just be slotted into your existing server room
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you throw one of these puppies in or maybe even a newer one so this is a 100
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gigabit infiniband card so super low latency yeah wire that up to your
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network and the difference in these like what are like
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milliseconds maybe five milliseconds the difference there could be hundreds of
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thousands or millions of dollars in that industry a couple hundred traders over a
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year like it can be a big increase for a small amount of money so the investment
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in one of these servers makes a ton of sense there but for us i'm not running
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out and recommending that everyone go and buy one of these it's just too
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freaking loud it's it's very loud otherwise it'd be pretty sweet though
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yeah like maybe we should just re-insulate the server like a second
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layer or we could even just put like more sound deadening around that box or
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we could just upgrade the server that's in there right now
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subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description as
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long as you're in the high frequency trading market portion of the finance
15:14
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our merch store which has cool shirts oh it's gebo today nope we don't have this
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shirt maybe that jacket this jacket will be coming eventually cool shirts like
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that one
15:28
chill that shill it nick oh wow oh whoa
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ah and i think we're done here
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