Thingomy

Thank you tkitch. There are motherboards that will get the job done, but you are right, careful selection is needed. If you have any recomendations for a full ATX case that has a modern feature set, I'm interested. my search (perhapse in the wrong place) turnexd up nothing of any help. 7 rear slots is very common, but isn't big enough. 8 is borderline..

I'm building machine(s) with the following requirements, and I can't find a suitable case, recommendations would be appreciated: Two large modern graphics cards -- this is the hard bit, motherboard still TBC, for a graphics card with a non-blower cooler to fit, and not be suffocated, needs (IMHO) at least 4 slots of volume, and most performance motherboards use the top slot for other things, so this means either needing 9 slots (the bottom 2 don't need actual slots, but the equivalent air circulation space is needed down there.) Air cooled, I'm not going down the water cooling rabbit hole, so it needs good ventilation, but doesn’t necessarily need space for rads. Machine will end up with a 12 core CPU, and will be doing overnight rendering runs fully utilising both CPU and GPUs, so will be generating a lot of heat. Needs to look business-like -- this is a workstation at a workplace, it's not a gaming rig. I will tolerate having to unplug all of the RGB bits, but I'm not having a machine with a window in the side panel, nor do I want go faster stripes. I'm currently using Phanteks Enthoo pro 2 cases -- while they are huge and heavy -- and look the part -- 90% of the features are wasted on us, they frankly have too much ventilation as we are not populating all the fan slots and while they have what looks like an option for extra bracket arrangements to support a second graphics card with a PCIE extension, it's just not a good solution as it's only a double slot, so it suffocates the second card. (in the end I didn't even bother trying to source the extra brackets needed to cobble this together and gave up sticking with normal mounting and a suffocated card) If anyone is curious, we are running Agisoft Metashape, there are benchamrks on what it needs/wants/is picky about on Pugit Systems. As a bonus, we may at some point also be building machines of the same spec that will end up in a rack -- so rackmount cases that fit these requirments would be useful too, but this is a secodnary question.

I have recently built a machine with an i9 9920x with Asus prime x299-a and a pair of RTX2070s. The machine is to be used for heavy, long duration render jobs using cuda, hence the dual graphics cards that don't normally work together. The machine is working great, and informal benchmarking puts it 3 times faster that our other graphics workstations for some real world workloads. Only I'm moderately concerned about CPU temp reporting -- when I fired up speedfan a few minutes ago, it reported light workload CPU temps of about 11c -- Noctua air coolers are good, but getting more than 5c sub ambiant isn't really a thing, so it looks to me as if something is clearly wrong with the reporting here. I'm currently running furmark; prime95 and a render job on the other GPU and the temps have stabilised at CPU 70c-75c (read off the speedfan graphs) and GPUs 73 and 56 respectively (read off furmark) Thoughts?

That is indeed a good find, but the depth would be prohibitive, and i'm not sure that a case capable of taking a CEB motherboard is ideal. It is however the closest i've seen. Separating storage and compute is a good plan, but the machine pulls double duty as a zfs based file server and HTPC, unfortunately i'm already comitted as far as that is concerned. Perhapse using a basic htpc case, and either building or buying an esata solution for 4 x 3.5 disks could work...

Can anyone recomend a good slim case that wont look out of place in a home theatre environment in a slot that may have been designed for a VCR etc. A slim case for low profile pci-e cards and a micro atx motherboard would be ideal. Only I need to be able to take 5x 3.5 disks (ideally 6). I suppose for future expansion I should have room for an optical drive too. For the last 2 years I've been using the insert out of the motherboard box, on a dining chair, but I'd like the chair back. I'd be tempted to do a sleeper pc in a really old school vcr, or even beter, a betamax machine, but I really can't be bothered.

Ah fair point... can be seen at 8:40

That is indeed the closet I've seen, and pretty close to what's needed, but at over 300 grams and 60w is overkill for what I'm doing. The earlier version which confusingly has the same specs is about 2/3 the weight. It seems that all the companies are doing the lightweight, perfect spec chargers in wall plug only models, and only the heavier ones in C7 connector form factor, very frustrating. I'm sure there has to be somone out there doing the right thing.

I had been to Anker already, and i didn't see anything that met the needs there either.

I'm looking for a travel charger for my phone, tablet and camera, I can't find anything that meets my needs, any advice would be appriciated. I travel with other electronics, and have standardised on the "C7" (aka shotgun) connector to connect everything to the wall, and I have a set of cables for this, so the charger needs to connect via this. I would adapt this if required, but I would much rather not. It needs to be reliable, not catch fire, be quiet (while next to bed at night), have good stable power output and perferably be from a known brand. I would like it to be light weight and small within reason. I would like it to be able to charge things quickly and be future proof, I believe this means PD support, but I don't need full laptop charging capabilities. I would like 2 USB A ports and a USB C port, though this is flexible. I got one of these (or at least something that looks like it) it's a mac charger style knockoff, so it supports the C7 connector, but it makes a horrid whining noise when running at low current, and doesn't reliably charge my sony a7iii camera: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XGH229R The following does everything perfectly, but is heavier and more powerful than desired: https://www.aukey.com/products/amp-46w-power-delivery-wall-charger-with-quick-charger-3-0-pa-y13 This has almost everything I want (even if it is a port short) and is the right weight and size, but uses a north american style plug, not a C7 connector. Ironically I will be converting UK, EU and Aus plugs to it, rarely will I need north American. https://www.aukey.com/products/amp-pd-usb-c-wall-charger-pa-y11

I've used a similar laser scanner to that (Faro brand, havn't read the details of specs on your one though) -- results are awesome if you are an archetect and you want a baseline for building a cad model around, or you want to spend lots of time and energy on post processing (and money on hardware with hidden software costs...) For my work i do lots of work with photogrammetry, very powerful techneque. I personally use agisoft photoscan, but there are different good options. Only reason to specifically use 36 images on a round is because it goes into 360degrees as a round number. I use experiance to work out how many I need for the job at hand -- big lump of wood with lots of texture and no concavities, start with 2 rounds of 16 from diferent heights, then add 6 from high up. -- rodent skull (small, complex geometry, concavities, low surface textures), triple the above in every direction, then spend the next week having nightmares about it. If experimenting for the sake of learning, use whatever camera you have, a mobile phone is actually a very good place to start. Just never zoom during a set unless you know whats going on. Keep with either landscape or portrate for a set. You have a fixed number of pixels per image, use them wisely, fill the frame as much as you can. Make sure the details you are interested in are clear in the images. You need every point on the surface covered ideally 5+ times (no reference for that, its just my rule of thumb). If doing a tree, you cant get the top bits without using a drone, and trees have such complex geometries, I wouldn't attemp one. In my line of work i'd be looking at generating a model that contained every leaf and twig with enough detail that a scientist could measure them for research. Your usecase may be diffent though.

Interested to know what crane they are using there; and if anyone knows if its any good. I'd love to see more behind scenes and/or equipment discussion videos; I remeber a few about the time they got one of the red cameras a while back that was super interesting. I'm actially a stills rather than video person, but the video kit is still interesting.

I'm trying to buy a 1080 ti in the UK, and I've just found that none of the online stores have any decent stock levels -- everything looked fine a week ago though. Is something going on?

I'm building a rig that will be doing some heavy Agisoft Photoscan work, and am struggling a bit. This workload uses mostly multi core, but with some single core in there too. looking at available processors in the price range, it seems somewhat of a no brainer to go for either a 7900x or a 7940x, but I'm struggling ot know which to go for. Core counts suggests that 7940x is the way to go; however Pugit Systems spec a 7900x in their standard systems. Sure the actual clock speed is a bit lower on the 7940x, but it looks almost negligible numbers wise to me. To confuse things, the price is almost identical. Have I missed something? Is there an actual difference here that I'm not seeing? Thoughts? recommendations?

Ok, so do I stick with the intel hd630 graphics or do I add the Radeon R7 430 2G -- I honestly have no idea which would perform better.

Unfortuantely I'm stuck in a higher education setting dealing with approved suppiers and standard stuff; for a diferent project I told them I wanted a graphics workstation with a 1070 in it, they told me the only option they had was to use a quadro. Not at all flexible. The model up from that on the list is (and I'm not really considering this an option): Xeon w-2123 4 cores Quadro p400 Video and audio editing stuff will be occasional and "education" grade stuff, not "production" grade stuff (IE, this will be people learning the process, not actually producing real content), so it's going to be small projects and it's ok if it's not totally snappy, as long as it's functional. I suppose the question I should be asking is -- do I kick off and tell them I need a totally custom build, (in incurr the wrath of the finance, procurment and windows build teams) or will this do the job?