HELIOS - ASSEMBLED 2015-SEP-06 - (Caselabs SMH10 | Black/Copper | EVGA SR-2 )

[frozenskipper]

Wow! So much work put into detailing. I loved the Zeus build aswell. Can't wait to see Helios finished!

[kuddlesworth9419]

HELIOS like the in Fallout New Vegas HELIOS One.

[frozenskipper]

Helios as in Helios, Zeus and the other greek gods.

[alpenwasser]

Wow! So much work put into detailing. I loved the Zeus build aswell. Can't wait to see Helios finished!

 

Thanks mate! Yeah, I'm looking forward to finally having this up and running as

well, although I estimate it will be at least another month before I'm completely

finished.

 

HELIOS like the in Fallout New Vegas HELIOS One.

 

The original HELIOS (my first PC in 2001) was actually named after the AI in the

first Deus Ex game (love that game :wub: ).

 

Helios as in Helios, Zeus and the other greek gods.

After that I then continued with that mantra because I've always had a weakness for

Greek mythology. At some point I had actually named all the partitions in my previous

Zeus (the rig I was running 2007~2013) after Zeus' daughters. But I ran out of names

so I had to switch to numerical designations (which were also a bit easier to organize,

the name thing got kinda confusing towards the end :lol: ).

Side note: I have the major power cables finished, if all goes according to plan

I should have an update on that tomorrow. :)

[frozenskipper]

 

Thanks mate! Yeah, I'm looking forward to finally having this up and running as

well, although I estimate it will be at least another month before I'm completely

finished.

 

 

The original HELIOS (my first PC in 2001) was actually named after the AI in the

first Deus Ex game (love that game :wub: ).

 

After that I then continued with that mantra because I've always had a weakness for

Greek mythology. At some point I had actually named all the partitions in my previous

Zeus (the rig I was running 2007~2013) after Zeus' daughters. But I ran out of names

so I had to switch to numerical designations (which were also a bit easier to organize,

the name thing got kinda confusing towards the end :lol: ).

Side note: I have the major power cables finished, if all goes according to plan

I should have an update on that tomorrow. :)

 

Haha! Neat way of personalizing yer build. My rig is called The Swine Pelt. A noisy brute, she is :p

[alpenwasser]

Haha! Neat way of personalizing yer build. My rig is called The Swine Pelt. A noisy brute, she is :P

That just might be the most hilarious PC name ever! :lol:

[L.E.D]

Nice build man, great work, May seem a little creepy but I like the style of you home lol, anyway, keep up the good work

 

Nathan

[alpenwasser]

Nice build man, great work, May seem a little creepy but I like the style of you home lol, anyway, keep up the good work

 

Nathan

Haha, thanks man! :)

And don't worry, it is a very nice home we have indeed and we're very happy here.

We're very lucky the couple who lived here before got a divorce and had to sell the

place. :D

EDIT:

Before anyone thinks I'm a completely horrible person: My parents' divorce took more

than four years and was a rather unpleasant process, so I can sympathize. But still,

we were very lucky the apartment's previous owners got divorced, can't change anything

about that.

[alpenwasser]

Major Power Cables Finished

So, this is what about 40 hours of cabling have gotten me: One 24 pin, two EPS 8 pins,

one PCI-E 8 pin and four PCI-E 6 pins. I'm not completely done with them (I need to

reinforce the 24 pin's lacing a bit), but the main part is done when it comes to power

cables.

The GPU Cable

This is what the GPU cable looked like before lacing.

(click image for full res)

CPU1 + PCI-E Aux

These are the cables for the CPU1 power delivery (8 pin EPS + 6 pin PCI-E) and the SR-2's

PCI-E auxiliary 6 pin for the PCI-E slots themselves. Makes for 20 wires in total. First I crimped

their M/B terminals:

(click image for full res)

After that I colour-coded them to know which pair of wires needed to be sleeved with which

paracord colour. Doing that 20 wire cable is pretty much the only thing I did this week. All in

all it was about 15 hours of work (cutting, crimping, sleeving, lacing). The PSU side crimps

were only crimped onto the wires once the whole harness had been laced so that the

wires had the right length (obviously the outer wires in the bends will have to be longer).

(click image for full res)

Main Cables

And these are most of the major power cables. What's missing here is the GPU power delivery

because I'd already tied that to the case when I took this picture. As you can see the cables

are all stuck together because of the way I had to do the PSU side of things. How I organize

the PSU connectors is determined by the PSU's power rail design and connector layout.

The harness is surprisingly stiff (considering Silicone wire is very floppy) and holds its shape

pretty well with all the lacing.

(click image for full res)

Mounted

And this is how the whole harness looks when it's mounted into the case. The messy bit above

the PSU will still be cleaned up a bit, plus most of it will be hidden.

(click image for full res)

Hiding the Messy Bits

Besides the side door, the reservoir mounting plate will hide those bits of my cabling which I

haven't tidied up to insane levels.

(click image for full res)

20 Wire Run

And a glamour shot of that 20 wire cable. I know I could have routed this cable through a hole

which is situated pretty much perfectly, but since I spend this much time on my cables anyway

I thought I might as well make them a proper feature.

(click image for full res)

That's it for today. I have to admit I look forward to doing something else besides cables

now. There's still some cable work to be done (the pumps, fans and some other small

parts), but the major work is done now. 40 hours of cable work is quite enough for now. :D

Next Up

I'll be starting to experiment with the copper tubing next week.

Thanks for stopping by. :)

Edited July 6, 2013 by alpenwasser

[Raboo]

Just WOW

[Axis]

u're kidding me right ?

 

:huh: my brain cant understand what my eyes are seeing :blink:

 

railroad of epicness right there! :o

[MdX MaxX]

How sore are your hands after sleeving all those cables? :lol:

 

Marvelous work.

[alpenwasser]

:blink: Just WOW

Thanks!

u're kidding me right ?

:huh: my brain cant understand what my eyes are seeing :blink:

railroad of epicness right there! :o

No man, I'm totally serious! :D

Thanks!

How sore are your hands after sleeving all those cables? :lol:

Marvelous work.

Haha, to be honest my hands are actually not the problem since the sleeving technique

I'm using (I'll make a vid on that btw.) does not involve burning your fingers and

stuff like that.

However, my brain is seriously hurting and needs a proper rest from making and lacing

cables. Yesterday alone I did 7 hours of lacing on the long 20 wire cable, I bloody dreamed

about lacing cables last night. :blink: :wacko:

Thank you folks!

Edited July 6, 2013 by alpenwasser

[frozenskipper]

Kinda makes me ashamed of using standard psu cables :\

[alpenwasser]

Kinda makes me ashamed of using standard psu cables :\

Sorry about that. :lol:

To make you feel better, may I remind you that I was also responsible for this rather

messy affair... :D

(click image for full res)

[everything count to life]

The sleeving and the lacing just good pure awesome, wow I'm really amazed great job :D

[alpenwasser]

The sleeving and the lacing just good pure awesome, wow I'm really amazed great job :D

Thanks mate! :)

[L.E.D]

Great progress, I will say that I was skeptical of the lacing but it turned out great ! Great work.

[crunzaty]

You're build is so insane man, it's really good!

[alpenwasser]

Great progress, I will say that I was skeptical of the lacing but it turned out great ! Great work.

Thanks! :) The bit about which I'm most skeptical with the whole build is the copper

tubing tbh. It will be quite the challenge getting that right.

 

You're build is so insane man, it's really good!

Haha, thank you! :)

She's Alive

So with the major cabling finally finished I was able to plug it all together for

the first time tonight, and I'm happy to report that so far the hardware seems to

be intact. I haven't yet done any stress-testing on the components, but the M/B

POSTs, both CPUs as well as all the memory are detected and the Titan displays on

image on the screen.

I will be installing Arch in the next few days to be able to do some stress testing

on the rig to see if there's anything wrong.

[epeets]

Yay! Cant wait to see more pics of it!! She lives, so now you can breathe a little easier.  :)

[L.E.D]

Thanks! :) The bit about which I'm most skeptical with the whole build is the copper

tubing tbh. It will be quite the challenge getting that right.

 

Haha, thank you! :)

She's Alive

So with the major cabling finally finished I was able to plug it all together for

the first time tonight, and I'm happy to report that so far the hardware seems to

be intact. I haven't yet done any stress-testing on the components, but the M/B

POSTs, both CPUs as well as all the memory are detected and the Titan displays on

image on the screen.

I will be installing Arch in the next few days to be able to do some stress testing

on the rig to see if there's anything wrong.

 

 

Did you say that you are going to be running Arch Linux ? 

[alpenwasser]

Yay! Cant wait to see more pics of it!! She lives, so now you can breathe a little easier.  :)

 

Oh yes, it's a huge relief indeed! :)

Did you say that you are going to be running Arch Linux ?

Most likely. And since I really like ZFS I will be trying to install Arch on a ZFS

root partition. I haven't managed to get it running completely smoothly yet, but the

first try has been promising. I will continue to tinker around with it tomorrow. :)

If I fail I'll either go for a FreeBSD installation or a more conventional Arch setup,

haven't decided yet on that. The 12 cores would make for some nice compile times

on FreeBSD. :D

The final concept will be to utilize the computing power of this rig for BOINC with

the CPUs doing a variety of projects and the GTX Titan computing for GPUGrid. Since

GPUGrid is CUDA-based the Titan's high CUDA core count should come in handy.

[L.E.D]

So you whole idea was to make a rig for boinc or folding at home, or was that just something you could do because now you truly have the power to do it ?

[alpenwasser]

So you whole idea was to make a rig for boinc or folding at home, or was that just something you could do because now you truly have the power to do it ?

Well, basically I saw the SR-2, fell in love and thought it would be rather ridiculous

if I didn't put that computing power to some good use, so that was the second scenario.

The Titan on the other hand I specifically bought for computing. It's overprized as it

is, but computing at least can make good use of its power, whereas it is way too expensive

for gaming unless you're running some totally ridiculous screen setup.

If the 780 had come out sooner I might have bought that one, but considering what a

stunning piece of engineering the Titan is and its capability to run double-precision

floating point ops (which may actually be of some use in some computing scenarios)

I can't say I regret buying the Titan.

So, to make it short: With regards to the CPU it was the second one, concerning the

GPU it's the first answer.

As for F@H vs BOINC, I will simply quote a post I made about the topic on OC3D here.

It's a topic that's pretty important to me, so I may as well address it now.

 

Rant incoming!

Yeah I used to do F@H until quite recently (~ 9 million points so far) until I got

fed up with the fact that there's not GPU support on Linux. I'm not installing

Windows just for folding since my folding rig will actually also be my work rig.

If I had a separate rig for doing work I'd probably consider making a Windows

rig for folding alone but alas...

I understand that resources for development are limited and that you need

to consider what benefits you get from an investment (in this case, porting

GPU folding to Linux), but I just feel treated a bit disrespectfully.

Also, since it is possible to get it to work in Linux with WINE (it's a bit

finicky and doesn't always work, but it can be done) it cannot be that

bloody difficult to port it, for f***k's sake.

I'm also not very pleased with the fact that the client is closed source

software and nobody is allowed to look into what the hell is actually going

on in there. They claim this is to prevent people screwing with the credits

system. But that just says to me that they don't fully understand how to

do this in the first place. If you do it right, it must not f*****g matter whether

or not people can look at your source code; the should not be able to mess

with the system!

I'm aware that most people don't care at all about this. But if I'm spending

my hard-earned money (which is a substantial amount of my income as a

college student) on this, I want to bloody know what the **** is being

computed on my machine, and I have a f*****g right to do so.

Overall, I just feel like I'm being treated with quite a bit of disrespect as a

donor, and I don't really feel like donating the equivalent of hundreds (so far)

or thousands (if I kept going) USD to a project that basically treats me like

a moron.

BOINC is not at all without its problems, I'm well aware of that. The credits

system is quite screwed up, but that's not because the source code is open.

The reason for that is that different projects can basically operate indepen-

dently without central governing and determine themselves how much credit

they approve for their donors.

You might make 40k points for one day's work on one project and 80k per

day on another project. So the global overall rankings are quite meaningless,

the thing that carries importance are the rankings per individual project.

The culture on the side of the project (not talking about the donors here,

to be clear) is a lot more friendly and open. Problems (and there are quite

a few, indeed) are discussed openly and you actually more or less know

what the hell is going on as a donor as long as you bother to actually

inform yourself.

Also, I quite like the freedom of being able to select what projects to

compute for. You can do physics, medicine (there's protein folding research

being done on BOINC as well), maths and other stuff.

Currently I'm doing work for the Milkyway project and Enigma (they have

a few messages from WWII that so far have not been decoded and now

they're trying brute force ). Once I get HELIOS up and running I'll

probably also be doing Rosetta and GPU Grid (both medical research, since

I do think that is quite important as somebody befallen with health issues).

Just to avoid misunderstandings: I have no problem with other people doing

F@H, and I do think that the project's aims are noble and their intentions

good, but some of the people making decisions seem to be suffering a bit

from the "we're so successful we can do anything and nobody will bloody

care let alone stop us" attitude.

Anyway, since nobody will probably ever read this rand in its entirety, I

will now stop.