DIY pfSense Rackmount Router Build Log - Part 2
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
3,119 words · ~15 min read
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that feeling when a package that you ordered on eBay or whatever finally
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arrives you tear it open take out the packing material and it's that last part
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you need to build a machine that you've been waiting forever to build this is my
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new motherboard for the DIY PF sense router machine and hopefully the one
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that's going to survive drop a like on the video if you
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like that feeling as well and drop a dislike if uh you hate seeing me kill
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Hardware Corsair RMI series power supplies feature premium components for
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great performance with very low noise check out the link in the video
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description to learn more be
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respectful this is a graveyard the graveyard of
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motherboards so here is everything for the DIY PF sense
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router including my two dead s1200 KP Intel
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server boards let's see if third time really is
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a charm now in the comments under part
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one of this video there's a lot of people criticizing the choices that I've
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made in terms of the hardware for this machine with crit criticism number one
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being lonus why didn't you just buy a cheap oneu machine on eBay and use that
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with my response being well because
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that's not a very interesting video me sitting at my computer clicking by and
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number two with people saying how over kill it is that I'm using a Zeon for a
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router I know we already had it I didn't
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I didn't run out and and buy it to make this video now with that said I have
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bought a couple motherboards now but that is because we are already many
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hours of 3D printing into creating some custom Hardware in order to make this
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project work and could we have found something that would fit together better
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out of the box yes of course we could
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but that's not fun and we are going to start by testing this motherboard
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outside of the system to find out if it
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works at all before we uh introduce some
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of the variables that might end up killing it so we'll start with CPU
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installation this CPU known good I
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actually ran it uh right before I started up this
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build log in the first place and it was fine RAM very unlikely that's killing
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our motherboard it's actually on the validated list not to mention that it's
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Kingston RAM and the last time Kingston produced RAM that killed anything was oh
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I don't know never now I've got a lot of people saying that it's my cooler and
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back plate that are killing the board to which I would reply did you even watch
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like did you even watch the video the entire back plate is covered in
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electrical tape that is not what happened but for the haters I'm going to
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go and I'm going to grab a stock heat sink to test the board with
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first for extra safety I'm going to try
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a standard desktop power supply next
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now I don't think the problem is my
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power supply what I think the problem is is someone that almost nobody in the
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comments actually picked up on and that
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is this four pin connector that comes off of the oneu power supply that I
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plugged into a fan header on the motherboard that I checked with a
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multimeter later and which appeared to be
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supplying rather than requiring power
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no power to my mouse and keyboard why don't we start
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with different RAM and see how it goes
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from there now it's always possible when a motherboard dies that it can take
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other Hardware with it and I really hoping that it didn't kill our Zeon
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CPU let's try a different CPU so now
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I've got a 3570k from the CPU pile to try the weird
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thing is with the the other chip I wasn't getting any beep codes and it was
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warming up it was actually getting power okay this time it's failing post new
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plan it's quite possible that even though they're on the same socket uh
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this motherboard doesn't actually support the 3000 Series processor so I
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grabbed a 2600 and we're going to take this baby
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for a spin no power to the peripheral
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still I'm starting to think we've got a dead board on our hands
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here I can try a different stick of memory so oh oh hello so she's a little
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picky on the memory compatibility but we
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have a post this is good news now let's
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try our Zeon chip with that
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RAM and see how that goes I think we may
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have not only killed our board but also
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killed our CPU and RAM so we're going to
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the 2600 and the full height RAM even
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though that's not really going to work for the final build I'm going to give it
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a shot first I'm going to try the
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3570k to see if our BIOS update at the very least might have given us more
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options for newer generation processors to work in this board well that's the
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end of that chapter now let's try the uh now let's
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try the original Zeon
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hey all right the RAM
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works but the CPU is dead which means I
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can build today and change out the CPU
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if I decide to do that at all remember
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zon for ECC support so we're not actually taking advantage of the ECC
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memory so if I decide to change out the CPU I can do that at another time all
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right let's let's let's Forge ahead then I'm gon give you guys a little lesson on
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electronics a piece of plastic shroud
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over top of a speaker does not affect
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the functionality as I will prove right
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now so as you can see just like on the
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previous two attempts I have only
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removed the top of the plastic let's go
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power it on oh what's that oh oh cutting
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down oh cutting down the speaker doesn't do anything because why would it I could
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rip the speaker right off and it wouldn't do anything the speaker just
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wouldn't work huh how about that the
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number of people educating me about the dangers of a metal back
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plate fairly High I don't know if you guys know this but uh the manufacturer
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of this CPU heat sink is also aware of
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the dangers of metal back plates and the back plate actually had a non-conductive
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coating on it um
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so yeah that that was a thing
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um but just in case I had damaged that
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non-conductive coating I did there we go we've got CPU contact I
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did cover it in electricians tape last
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time around the internet was right I think the back plate heat sink mount did
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Kill the board because we are now down to well up to three dead boards but not
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for the reason that they think it did because the back plates anti- conductive
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coating was not penetrated I think the reason it died was actually from too
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much mounting pressure but there's good news and we are going ahead with the
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project because I've discovered that my Z87 n Wi-Fi
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motherboard happens to be almost
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identically laid out to the Intel board
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that we were using before so I've grabbed a different Zeon and we are just
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going to build a router today damn it no
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matter what because our gigabit internet upgrade is already done so here we go
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now for my next trick I'm going to take
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my test bench and physically move it into the
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case all right power supply still
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works very good we are in good shape shape friends
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we are in good shapee okay there's still one more thing to go wrong actually now
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I'm not going to use the same PCI e1x
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Riser that I was using before if I can get away with it because my 16x Riser
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that I ordered on eBay actually has finally arrived so we should be able to
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get full 4X performance out of this card assuming that this solution works at all
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um so now we're going to go almost all
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the way and boot into the OS and see if
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our network card is
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recognized let's pull this back off oh
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oh I think that was plugged in kind of funny maybe that was the issue all
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right that was the issue just needed to receip that
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puppy and I really don't like that this keeps going load optimize default then
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boot you stop that What's your
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deal so it actually blue screened even without our network card in there which
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leads me to believe maybe it's something else my Windows 7 bench Drive could be
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just kind of flaky right now so let's try my Windows 8 test drive so we're
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booted into the Windows 8 drive so we're going to try our network card
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again if anyone from Microsoft is watching why the
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actual if I start typing my password immediately on that screen and I only
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have a single user account on the machine does it not just log me in
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there's always like a quarter of a second delay and it misses the first
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character or two fix that all of our
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Network ports are showing up it is time
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to actually install it inside the
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machine so what I'm doing is I'm actually trying to jam enough wires
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through this Gap that even if I
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accidentally press down on this tab
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while I close it it actually can't open
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cuz that'll release my memory modules just for doing some some quick testing
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here so I'm going to put this baby up
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here right oh we're close I can smell it
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now this is a cool thing about this case you can actually
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install your expansion card either way and I think we may be better served by
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doing it this way this time so if I
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press on these is it going to move
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nope it's finally here everything is
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working which leads us at
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last to the whole point the thing I
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wanted to test with this video our
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custom cooling shroud
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forour heat sink we need to test two
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different scenarios number one how does
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it perform with only these high RPM fans
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pulling air from the front and blowing it out the back of the chassis towards
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our aligned CPU heat sink and in order
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to give this config the best fighting chance we're actually going to try it a
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couple of different ways because you can see
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the way the chassis is meant to channel airf flow is in the front SL top a
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little bit and then out these ventilation holes at the back so we can
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actually try it both with the whole
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thing open and with everything around
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the CPU heat sink itself actually
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blocked off so that we're getting more air flow through the fins of the heat
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sink but let's try it completely open first so our idle temps actually look
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pretty good sitting in the 35 to you know 40° range so for the sake
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of this video I think we're going to use the uh CPU package temperature here all
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right let's start a stress test and see what happens to that well 65 still
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climbing uh so what are our so our
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hottest core is sitting at around 60° with the package sitting at
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63 all right we'll let that reach equilibrium and we'll come back in just
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a moment okay small update temperatures are still Rising we've reached 70° on
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the CPU package 71 now okay I think our
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maximum temps have settled in now per my
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usual approach I'm taking the highest number that it's recorded So CPU package
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has spiked as high as an 80°
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reading a little higher than I'd be comfortable with with that said this
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system's not going to be under that kind of a load 24/7 but still so we're going
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to go ahead and we're going to block off the holes that we don't want it
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using and see if that helps now it's actually kind of hard to tell from
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looking at these temperatures because they're kind of all over the place but
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with our blocked off holes you can actually see from the curve that shows
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all of the cart temperatures that we're getting a little bit
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more empty space under that 70° Mark
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right there so I would say yes we did get a few degrees
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Improvement by using this approach this is kind of a funny story I've got the uh
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the architect of the fan shroud that we'll be installing for our second test
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and he was about to explain to me why one of the pieces of the Shroud has like
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this janky thing cut in it so when I was modeling it originally I forgot that
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there's is it I think it's this thing yeah yeah this thing is right in the way
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so oh look it perfectly fits now okay so we actually had to change the
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motherboard yeah I know so now my all my
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plans are are wrecked uh all the
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original measurements like is it significantly different
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no okay so now that you move that where it belongs this shroud should fit very
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oh look at how perfect perfect that is it's so perfect and I gave this buffer
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room here I didn't make it as long as it needs to be cuz it can overlap a little
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bit your modesty is truly amazing yeah
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just be careful
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just supposed to be flex room for it to be able to go in there that fits that's
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correct okay okay now no I I want to do it I want to do it I want do it all
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right note that the design still allows these three fans to cool the network
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card although we did not determine that we needed a shroud for that that little
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that thing is in the way I didn't model that so it's uh oh well it's supposed to
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be flush on the top it's not the way I designed it but yeah I mean it it's
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supposed to be flush I mean it's mostly flush most of the air flow is going to
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make it to the heat sink I think which is okay because it won't kill the system
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to have a little bit of air flow over here looks cool doesn't it all right
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let's close it up and and find out if
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our Maniac scheme here worked so for
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those wondering we actually 3D printed this sucker on the ultimaker 2 that we
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reviewed in the video that you can check out right over
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here there you have it folks absolutely
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fantastic by using our 3D printed shroud to direct more air flow towards our
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passive heat s we were able to drop our CPU
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temperatures by somewhere in the neighborhood of about
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10° meaning that even Under full load I
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would be extremely comfortable running this system all the time it took a long
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time for us to get here but our router is finally ready to
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load up pfSense and deploy in the server
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room with our new gigabit connection woo
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oh hi I didn't see you there you know what's great massdrop.com just head over
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wallet and get some great deals while you do it so that's it guys thank you
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19:04
that pretty much wraps it up if you're looking for something else to watch now
19:08
that you're all done with this one might I suggest you check out our Channel Super Fun video where we play the game
19:13
drunk stoned or stupid it's not nearly
19:16
as dumb as it sounds it's actually a pretty fun game terrible name though