So I was suppose to post an update about this over a week (or was it two...) ago but I suffer from something I like to call perpetual procrastination and my request for troubleshooting means this update is out-of-order to my last one so we're going backwards in time here.

 

Here's the X399 motherboard with the CPU installed:

This thing has a lot of expansion options. The plan is to run my two GPUs in the 1st & 4th slots then install my 20Gbit NIC in the bottom-most slot.

 

People keep going on about how huge the IHS is on TR and the amount of TIM that's needed to cover it so I thought I'd share my method:

That's it. That's my method. A custom cut piece of graphite.

 

The waterblock does look amazing:

and it's heavy, like really heavy so I wouldn't be afraid to POST the system prior to pluming it up.

 

This all worked out quite well. Using HWiNFO & Prime95 for testing I saw 

Idle temp: 34°C

Max temp: 59.5°C

 

I could probably get that down a bit if I used actual thermal paste but I don't feel the mess would be worth it. With all 16 cores active under Prime95 it only turboed up to 3.65GHz which is a far cry from the 4.2GHz clock you can see it hit in the BIOS. I do plan on doing some overclocking (not extreme) but I think I'm going to replace my power supply first. It's 6 years old and the BIOS reports the 5V rail dipping under 4.5V. What supports my reason for trusting this is having the system under a high load and it spontaneously shutdown/restarts. Typical of not getting enough power. The PSU comes with a 10 year warranty and I'm debating weather or not to try and pursue that before buying a brand new one. It's worth a shot. Save a couple $100.

 

In server related news I said I was going to make an update on that damn Intel X540 in the server. I whipped together a model fan duct and printed it out. It's worth noting to make sure you check all the settings before you export to .gcode to prevent this:

Left was set to "course" as in it skips layers (a lot of layers) to make it print faster. I didn't realize it until the print was done.

Right was set to fine. There's some issues on the layers the screw holes are on. I don't know why that happened but it's solid and hold together fine.

 

The chassis's stock PCI_e I/O shields were oddly convenient for this situation since it made it so I could actually adjust this contraption up & down:

Testing it before I installed it it moves a lot of air.

 

Getting it installed:

You can see that silver heatsink. That is 1/3rd of the full X540 heatsink.

 

With everything closed up before this mod the X540 was hitting 80°C with the CPU's going full tilt. Now it maxes out at 73°C. It's better but that's about as much as I can do for it unless I were to source some small blower style fans and inserted them in-between the HBA's.

 

In other server related news I still plan on building the very power efficient, very dense (end goal being >= 100TB) 10Gbit capable backup storage server that will backup the SSD server and act as offsite backup but unfortunately life has gotten in the way and I'm forced to postpone that for at least a few months.

 

Reasons?

I decided my desktop has BSOD/Kernel paniced for the last time which prompted upgrading it (with the money that was to go to the server).

Rent costs money...who figured?

College tuition

 

If I happen to find a source of income beside my current income maybe it'll happen sooner but we'll have to wait and see.