confusis Posted August 27, 2012 Share Posted August 27, 2012 Quadb0x, redefining the home workstation. I am building this system with a few goals in mind. My workflow consists mostly of designing in Google/Trimble Sketchup, then exporting to Kerkythea for rendering. This is all done on one system - my Pentium G620 M-ITX build. While Sketchup performance is acceptable, renders take a long time. Metropolis Light Transport rendering is very CPU intensive, requiring a lot of time to complete. With my Pentium build, an acceptable quality 1280x1024 render would take 10-12 hours, obviously this will not do. One thing MLT rendering likes is cores. Lots of cores. Being able to split the workload efficiently over multiple physical cores will massively speed up the render portion of my workflow. The base of the build came about at a LAN party. The LAN was held at the offices of a renowned IT supplier in my home of Auckland. In a lull between the epic frag fests, I spotted the board sitting lonely in a display case, feeling sorry for itself. Such epic hardware, I had to ask the manager what the deal was. Apparently they ordered the motherboard for a high end NAS system. The customer's required RAID card however, failed to work in the board, nor did a couple of other options. This led to the board being put on display, left to never process a file or warm up a room again. A deal was agreed on, and the board left with me after the LAN concluded. Arima was a server and workstation motherboard and related products supplier that was originally based in the USA. Their final contract was to supply quad Opteron motherboards to Google. However, many corners were cut in the implementation of the system. Due to Google's servers using custom spun Linux distributions, Arima saw no need to complete the ACPI code in the BIOS, as Linux can run with minimal support of it. Microsoft Windows (even server variants) need not apply here. Along with the Windows limitation, various issues are present in regards to video card, RAID card, CPU and RAM support. The video card support is a trial and error affair, with many cards not working. This was solved slightly with later BIOS versions, but not truly fixed. CPU support is limited to Barcelona Opterons (≤2.5ghz) - Arima went under before the Shanghai (≤3.1ghz) processors were released. All in all, it is a capable, but limited, platform. I am, however, working on a modified BIOS, as well as a CoreBoot implementation for the board. My core design goals for this build are: Cheap - I have a VERY limited budget due to various factors Quiet - It will be running 24/7 in my own room Air cooled - Minimal hardware maintainence is important, set and forget Powerful - multiple cores, lots of RAM Storage - lots of storage The system will provide multiple roles. It will be my primary workstation, rendering in Linux, modelling in Windows, along with other jobs.. Specifications are as follows: Arima Argo AR-11 Motherboard 4x AMD K10 Opteron OS8347PAL4BGH B3 1.9GHz quad-cores 16x 512MB DDR2 ECC REG 533MHz 2x SATA 3 7200 RPM Hard Disk Drives 1x PSU TBD 1x Sapphire HD5670 1GB Graphics Card 2x Coolermaster 120mm Fans And so we begin! The Opterons: The board: Lots of pins! (1207 to be precise) The GPU: Design hints will be added to each update, so you can see where we are going. And so we begin some work! First up, it's a 'free' mod. Polishing caps. We begin with: A bit of a scrub later and we get this: After the polishing (except for a few stubborn caps :/ ) I then went and stripped the plastic sheath off the other capacitors: And it still works! Need to get better coolers :/ Next update will bring some chassis work, and some more board mods! (I will clean the board after the board mods are done.. No point at the moment ) Token Coolermaster product: (120mm Blue LED fan, will be buying more as I can afford it) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
confusis Posted August 27, 2012 Author Share Posted August 27, 2012 Reserved for final pics Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tnecniv102 Posted August 28, 2012 Share Posted August 28, 2012 whooooaah HUGE BOARD with 4 physical processors x4 cores! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
confusis Posted August 28, 2012 Author Share Posted August 28, 2012 whooooaah HUGE BOARD with 4 physical processors x4 cores! Yup, 16 cores Board itself measures 41cm x 33cm, or 16" x 13". And it's positively massive considering I usually build with M-ITX or M-ATX. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
confusis Posted August 28, 2012 Author Share Posted August 28, 2012 A quick preview of the design. The chassis will be made with 0.9mm aluminium. The tower coolers are 80mm Ice Edge Mini FS coolers, a product I've used before on various other builds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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