Work In Progress: "Anubis"

[Paltiel]

Updated Tuesday January 15, 2008

Another mini update today.

The drainport has been installed. It uses 1/4" inner diameter, 3/8" outer diameter tubing and includes its own compression fittings. Information on the drainport has been added to the initial post.

More parts will be installed in the near future. They include a quadruple disk hot-swap SAS drive bay, the aforementioned Tygon tubing, a fistful of SAS cables, and a DVD-DL burner.


Moto7451:
Thanks. Interestingly enough, I've momentarily disabled the flow meters' LEDs. Being blinded by the machine you're working on is never a good thing.

Jas:
Thanks! I saw your Armor, too. 'tis nice. ^_^

Hipcrostino:
Can I please borrow your luck? The junction between the 80mm radiator's output and its compression fitting wasn't tight enough. It leaked slightly. ^^;

Vagabond102:
Thanks muchly. I definitely plan on displaying the final images. So far, the project is about 60% complete.

 

[Proto]

Makes me sad I didn't buy that Armor.

 

[JamesXP]

If your not overclocking the CPU don't overclock the GFX cards because the CPU needs to be fast enough for the graphics card...

You know what specs is gonna be in it?

 

[Paltiel]

Updated Saturday January 19, 2008

Another mini-update today.
A Hot-swap drive bay and DVD-DL have been placed into the case. Picture is in the main thread, as usual.

Proto:
Armors are altogether very inexpensive. Mind you, this makes no assumption about the time that it would take you to eviscerate your current system and transplant it into a shiny, new Armor. In that case, the cost in time required to move components may be worth more than the cost of the new case.

JamesXP:
Sorry - specs don't exist yet. I'd imagine that you've read about AMD's latest debacle with Barcelona Opterons? That's why.
I understand your point of view, and agree with you - Non-overclocked CPUs won't be able to feed the video cards quickly enough at specific high resolutions in games. However, that thought does not apply if we use the video cards as GPGPUs (General Purpose Graphics Processing Units) for computational purposes. GPGPU processing power is generally not linked to the speed of the processor(s). It's more affected by RAM and PCIe bus transfer speeds.
This is primarily a business system that will run GPU-intensive software. Occasionally, it will be used to Frag the innocent builder (that's me) on weekends.
My wife isn't an FPS monster who is consumed with getting every last frame-per-second out of her system. ^_^
Although, considering how many times she's gleefully gibbed or telefragged me, she may qualify as being a general run-of-the-mill monster. ^_^;

 

[Hipcrostino]

looking good mate. Keep it up!

 

[Paltiel]

Updated Sunday March 16, 2008

Two are two new photos today. The motherboard and some supporting hardware have been installed. Most of the Clearflex tubing has been removed.

My wife's office can be seen in the background of the first picture.

 

[Hazaro]

Uhh, so what computer hardware is going into this thing?

Crazy already.

 

[Paltiel]

Hazaro:
Good afternoon.
We don't have specifics on the hardware yet because of AMD's inability to ship quad-core Opterons. The motherboard is a Supermicro H8DAi-2. It can handle two Opteron 2000 series CPUs, 32GB of RAM, and three video cards.

Here's a link if you're curious:
http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Opteron2000/MCP55/H8DAi-2.cfm

I'm planning on going with two Opteron HE series CPUs at either 1.9GHz or 2.0GHz. HE series Opterons only consume about 70W of power at peak utilization, as opposed to SE Opterons that can burn through 125W.
For video adapters, we're going to use one of the following:
A) 2 @ 700MHz factory-overclocked nVidia 8800GT cards with 512MB apiece, in SLi.
B) 3 @ nVidia Quadros.

It's basically a matter of timing: I'm waiting on an official answer from the vendor of my wife's CFD program as to if and when they're going to support CUDA (GPGPU). If they answer affirmatively, before the AMD processors become available, then we're going to spend more on the three video cards than on the rest of the entire system combined.