criticview

So, I finally got some pictures. Yes, i know we more or less found what type it is, but for completeness sake...

That galaxy is only a few floppies, or even I am 486, probably a few pentiums too.... ago... I wonder, some times, how many youths would actually give up when facing ms-dos and the word perfection five point one times over...

So, I've been trying over the last day to get at least something viable and more or less wallet friendly. The option I'm the "most certain" about is the Chieftek XFX-350BS, along with 1 or 2 15-pin sata to 4 pin molex. It seems to not be too much more cable mess to deal with than before, nor is it waisting too much extra wats etc. Then I found this thing, Seasonic TFX12V 300W 1U, but I'm not even sure I'd need to consider this. I couldn't find anything useful about this. I was also considering a modular psu, but that's driving the expenses up the wall, though it would help with cables I guess... Here, the SilverStone ST45SF-G, came out even though it wasn't the cheapest option, it stayed as near to the old spec as I could find.

But isn't any hole left open, after a new psu is in, going to cause the 120 mm fan, that usually pulls air through all six hdd trays, to suddenly get air from places both closer and easier accessible so to speak. It's just that I'd want to avoid causing inefficiencies to crop up while fixing a problem. It's not going to do a new psu in the nas any good, if suddanly the disks get too warm. In the original design, the psu took air through the bottom holes, and exhausted at the back, while the 120 mil pulled air through all disk trays, and who knows where else.

So, I should go with an sfx unit? Is there a way to fill up any holes to at least get the airflow as optimal as possible? six drives do generate a fair bit of heat when spinned up and working?

I'll try to get pictures made, though I guess you'd be better off with some online ones. Due to my visual impairment, I'll have to ask someone to help me out to make them, and that's not always an easy thing to acomplish on short notice. From what I could dig up, it's a SeaSonic 300w unit, it says atx but... I'd put a few links to at least do my homework, but i might as well link something totally not what we're looking for. Let's just go with the low whine / grinding for now, I was half asleep so the definition of the sound might be as fuddled as i was after such a quick and dirty wake up...

The ups is fine. It's still connected to my home server, and several days later, the alarm didn't turn on again, nor did it make any weird noise or anything. If it would have been the battery, the beeping would be regular, and not loud and constant. The noise reminded me more a sort of broken sprinkler system, rather than a really loud adapter or light structure...

The 120 mil in there was fine. So if it was the psu fan, then why would the ups freak out? Unless the psu overheated already once, but then the system would or should, have turned off, but didn't. I technically could use the pc psu, but that's so jank and would defeat the cooling of the drives due to the massive hole in the back... not to mention that I have my doubts on the health state of the psu after a while being in open air etc.

So, a few nights ago, my backups suddanly started beeping like mad. Not the typical "power out beep" but an alarm of some sort. Going downstairs and shutting down everything stopped it, but I couldn't help but notice my nas made weird grindy noises when it was powered on. Just for safeties sake, I unplugged all disks, and even then the noise remained. So, I'm assuming, and have acted on the assumption, that the psu failed, or was near to failing. Would a ups really detect such anomalies though? One thing is certain: temporarely connecting a psu from an unused system to the nas made it relive it's glory, without any weird noise, so at least I didn't lose the device. A long story short though: what do i do now? What kind of psu atx, sfx, sfxl, tfx, flexatx... or did netgear get me stuck in the mud with a disk filled heavy paper weight at this point.

Well, it seems, that one more week did the trick. I know patience is a virtue and so on, but hey, no one is perfect. I'd still like opinions though on the part selection and if the EVGA GPU is still the most folding points for the buck in relation to the other mentioned gpus above. Also, if anyone has any ideas on other tools I could check out for graphics card performance adjustments [undervolting, power limits etc...] please drop a line. MAI afterburner, even though seemingly extensive... simply doesn't work for me due to the issues with screen reading programs. To be fairly blunt, I pritty much doubt any program is going to work, but maybe, some manifacturer, maybe, maybe... just accidentally made the app useable... or maybe some dev or other, just made my life a bit easyer... lol

About around a week and a half ago, I sat down and composed my next system, so my current one can replace my wife's decrepit 4th gen, or older, intel. Selected parts below: ---------- - AMD Ryzen 7 3800X - SSD 250GB 1.5/3.4G 970 EVO PLUS M.2 - XILENCE Performance X Modular 750W ATX - HyperX 16 GB DDR4-3200 Predator Kit (HX432C16PB3/16, Predator, XMP) - Asrock B450 STEEL LEGEND - Enermax Equilence bk ATX - Noctua NH-D15 - 3x Fractal D. Dynamic X2 GP-12 - EVGA 6GB D6 RTX 2060 KO - 3x Scythe Kaze Flex SlimPWM 1800 120x120x27 ---------- My main purpose for this machine is to run a few vm's, do a few podcasts, be future proof for a long while to come (at least eight years or so), and certainly above all... folding. My issue however is the GPU: it's seemingly pritty darn difficult to get hold of any evga stuff, witch is fine, but should I actually wait, or should I call the store and tell them to put in one of the gpu's below, keeping in mind that I'd like to get the maximum performance out of it for folding above all else, and that I can't use any tools (to my limited knowledge at least) that will allow overclocking or undervolting. [msi afterburner really doesn't interact well with screen reading software period, so I am required to rely on what ever I can do to make the gpu run as best as possible from a hardware perspective] ----- - GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2060 OC 6G 2.0 grafische kaart3x DisplayPort, HDMI - INNO3D GeForce RTX 2060 Twin X2 grafische kaartHDMI, 3x DisplayPort - MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti GAMING X 6G grafische kaartHDMI, 3x DisplayPort ----- All cards were picked in the same pricepoint, so i'm currently limiting myself to those for making things easy... Any thaughts will be apriciated.

So, two weeks and what later, the hardware finally arrived. In short order, double sided taped the commander to the underside of the dvd rw, throw one fan in as top exhaust and one as side intake, second intake was impossible due to cpu cooler... So far, so good, unless you'd tumble over a few cables that I didn't ziptie for now, because I'm out of those. Here's where things get tricky though, because even though the new fans all are pwm, as well as the commander, i only had a 3 pin power fan header left. The case fan also was a 3 pin one, so i took the power fan. It is really louder than usual though, but sadly the only pwm header is the cpu one, I think. Mobo is a gigabyte ga990 udf3. So, can / should i just connect the commander to the cpu header, and throw the cpu fan in the commander to at least get things a bit more silent, or does 3 pin versus pwm make no difference in regards to sound.

This was the output of the sensors command a few days ago. It's not from the moment the temperatures were highest, but should give a fairly good idea. Due to the nature of the sensors command, I truly have no clue what part is witch, but this data linked with the fact that the case phisically became really warm / hot... The case is a COOLERMASTER Centurion 5 II from around 2012, no changes made since then, and all fans still working propperly. And here's the sensors output: ---------- fam15h_power-pci-00c4 Adapter: PCI adapter power1: 126.31 W (crit = 125.19 W) k10temp-pci-00c3 Adapter: PCI adapter temp1: +75.2°C (high = +70.0°C) (crit = +90.0°C, hyst = +87.0°C) it8720-isa-0228 Adapter: ISA adapter in0: +1.44 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in1: +1.47 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in2: +3.28 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) +5V: +2.99 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in4: +3.07 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in5: +3.34 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) in6: +4.08 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) ALARM 5VSB: +2.93 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +4.08 V) Vbat: +3.28 V fan1: 1457 RPM (min = 0 RPM) fan2: 706 RPM (min = 0 RPM) fan3: 787 RPM (min = 0 RPM) fan4: 0 RPM (min = 0 RPM) temp1: +45.0°C (low = +127.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = thermistor temp2: +73.0°C (low = +127.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = thermal diode temp3: +87.0°C (low = +127.0°C, high = +127.0°C) sensor = Intel PECI cpu0_vid: +0.113 V intrusion0: ALARM ----------

So, quick recap: home server got really really hot, around and over 80C. At first, I added a large fan for humans to keep it cool, till I could sit down and have a surf around for case fans. I ended up ordering a commander dohicky and 3 basic cheap fans, and here's where i get uncertain. So the left side of the case has a spot for 2 120 mm fans, and the top has a spot for one too. Between cpu cooler, whos fan faces the back of the case with the exhaust fan, so fan few cm of empty space exhaust fan, and the top of the case is like maybe 4 cm of space, so technically i could sneak a fan in there too. But should I? I can add 1 or 2 fans on the side, could try to add a fan in top... What I think I do know is that i'd need at least 1 or 2 intakes, so maybe two intakes on the side, with extra exhaust at the top without a fan... Parts i ordered: - 1 x Thermaltake Commander FP, Hub 10 Poort for PWM-fans fancontroller - 3 x Arctic F12 PWM PST case fan

So, after struggleing with FAH on the linux side for like forever, I'm finally comfortable saying all systems are go here. It's a downer to discover that, it's just an assumption, that using cli = being advanced, while my server is cli only for both braille terminal ease, and ssh and all that. So, some fights with google, firewall and text editors later, it's all good. The issue i'm currently having though, is that my systems got a few things to do, hence my collected 65k points, but now they're all doing nothing. To make things harder, if anyone would want to point me in the right direction, I can not use the advanced client, because of accessibility (for all I know, the application window is blank) and even with the most advanced screen reading tricks, it's still a freaking mess. In other words, I can only rely on config files and or command line if worst comes to worst. Also, kind of disappointed that I fell short of the registration window, but i'll still be folding, if there is work to do... I probably could get 200k dayly points, or there about, with my home server spending all cpu only (don't trust the gtx650 in there), so that's eight cores at supposedly 4 ghz, and my main system with a gtx1030 and ryzon2700 doing 80k on cpu for now and 70k on gpu... but thery're just doing nothing. Enough rambling on my end, I'm folding up this post with a snap...