Not your Usual O11D Air Mini

[Gorgon]

My old 9-year old venerable Windoze Daily Driver:

• Intel Xeon e3-1231v3
• SuperMicro X10-SL7-f
• 4 x 8GB DDR3-1800 ECC
• 2 x Samsung 240GB 850 Pro SSD (RAID0 - OS & Apps)
• 4 x Seagate 3TB NAS Drives (RAID 10 on LSI - Data)
• RadeonPro W4100, 3 x Asus ProArt 24" 1080p IPS Displays
• Fractal Node 804

is showing it's age and is slated to be replaced. It started out it's life running XP Pro 64, was upgraded to Windows 7 for only a year before I moved to Windows 10.

 

I'm an Old Fart and my reaction times are shot so I don't game anymore but I do some occasional Photography (Adobe CC) and Distributed Computing. So stability and support for Adobe CC are more important to me than raw frame rates.

 

My workspace is limited and I needed something that would fit in a space adequate for a mATX mid-tower at most but needed the features found only in ATX. I spent a lot of time agonizing over the chassis. Normally I like discreet black boxes (I have a LOT of Fractal Cases) and finally settled on the Lian-Li O11D Air Mini. I wanted the black variant but could only find stock in white when it came time to "pull the trigger"

• Lian-Li O11D Air Mini
• Aorus x570 Master 1.1 (new open-box)
• Ryzen 9 5900x (Harvested)
• 4 x 16GB XPG Gammix DR4-3200 CL16 (new)
• 2 x 500GB Samsung 980 PCIe3 nVME (OS)
• Noctua NH-D15 (Harvested) (fits with just 1mm clearance - good thing the RAM is low-profle)
• EVGA RTX 2070A (Harvested)
• Corsair TX650m (Harvested)

 

The motherboard was found at a local retailer, cheaper than the x570s and has 2.5Gb Realtech and 1Gbps Intel NICs unlike the "S" which only has Intel 2.5Gbps. I've got Win 10 64 Pro 21H2 on it now on one of the m.2 drives. Eventually the other m.2 will have Ubuntu 20.02 on it and the Win 10 will be a vM on top of it with the existing Windows m.2 and a RadeonPro WX4100 passed through to it, The 2070A will be doing Distributed Computing work in Linux.

 

It passed the initial QC tests, prime95 & Furmark for an hour, so it's running Folding@Home on the GPU and 19 threads of the CPU overnight.

 

Eventually I'll backup the RAID10 from the old system to my TrueNAS the destroy the array and use the drives in the new system passed-through to Windows.

[Gorgon]

Rsync'ing data from RAID10 on old system to TrueNAS Server. Had issues with DeltaCopy not working. Disabling the Compression flag fixed that so something has changed in Windows 10 since 20H1. Video files moved overnight at ~450Mbps.

 

Burn-In Testing:

Ran 4 passes of memtest86. 10 hours on 64GB with DOCP enabled with no errors. (Samsung E-die)

Ran 10 Hours of prime95 Torture Test (Blend)  with no errors. HWinfo64 showed 2 cores (3, 5) in CCD1 running hottest (90C) but no throttling and Tdie never went above 90.8.

Ran FurMark Torture Test - GPU got to 71C, 183W steady-state after 5 minutes

Ran Prime95 Torture Test (small FFTs) after GPU reached steady-state to test chassis cooling efficacy.

after 90 minutes:

CPU 133W (Avg) 145W (Max) 90.8C (Tdie Max) 76.6 (Tdie Avg)
GPU 183W (Avg) 204W (Max) 73.5C

VRM 54C (Max) 51C (Avg)

 

 

[TVwazhere]

I dont think I've seen many example of the O11 Air Mini, but I'm really digging this one!

[Gorgon]

Backed up the RAID 10 on the old system to my TrueNAS. Rebuilt the array using Windows Storage Spaces. I do have to say that Windows Storage Spaces is not yet ready for Prime Time. It took way too much time to create a true RAID 10 and not some sort of RAID 10 whose performance sucks. Coming from Linux with ZFS and MD the hoops I had to go through were laughable.

 

Got the data moved back. Occasionally when shuffling 5TB of data over the network I do lust after 10Gig but I was able to copy back from the TrueNAS and saturate my GigE at 900Mbps+. I'll likely hold out until 2.5GB switches become affordable as Manageability and VLANs are a necessity for me so dumb Layer2 switches are a no-go.

 

I've left the PCIe4 m.2 slot connected to the CPU empty. I'll pick up a 1 or 2 TB PCIe Gen4 m.2 in a few months when they get less expensive and use that for Virtual Machines and OS ISOs. As I've populated both the PCIe3 m.2 slots it means I've lost 2 of the 6 SATA ports.

 

Got the RadeonPro W4100 installed along side the RTX2070 Super. That was a bit of a dance as NVidia and AMD don't like to play together. So the W4100 is acting as Display out and the 2070 is busy crunching Einstein@Home.

 

I'm thinking I might get some 120mm Noctuas for Intake in the bottom of the Chassis. At a 150W power-limit the 2070 Super is running about 72C at 27C Ambient. Well withing spec but it tells me that it's a little starved for fresh air and the 2 Lian-Li 140mm front fans might need to be replaced.

 

There's something wrong with the BIOS Fan Control on the x570 Aorus Master. The rear 120mm fan wouldn't get above 800rpm with the custom fan curve tied to the CPU. Couldn't bother dicking around with it so I just set it to full speed. It's pretty quiet.

 

I'll likely wait until I put an Amazon order in next and just order a complete set of Noctua iPPC 2000s to replace the stock fans with.

Edited June 14 by Gorgon
Added screen-shot of NAS Data Transfer

[Gorgon]

Added a couple of Fractal Silent Series LT 1200rpm 120mm fans as bottom intake at full speed. Dropped the 2070 down to 68C and didn't appreciably add to the noise.

 

Finally remembered to re-install the 2.5: Drive bracket back in the chassis along with the retaining screw so I wouldn't lose it.

 

Note: Though Lian-Li claims you can use 4 x 3.5" drives actually installing two of them on the side mount requires using just the end cable for SATA Power (or modifying an existing cable cutting off the later connectors) and over-bending the SATA data cable in order to fit the connections to the lower 3.5" disk mounted with the connectors at the top due to how close the drove mounts are to each other. A 90 degree SATA Data connection reversed from the normal orientation would be useful here.

 

The Top Drive:

The Lower Drive:

Edited June 14 by Gorgon
Adding images for Drive Bracket Cabling issue

[Gorgon]

Treated myself to a set of Edifier R1280T Speakers to replace my 20 year old set of generic beige computer speakers.

 

Slight upgrade even to my tone-deaf ears.

[DJ46]

On 5/23/2022 at 7:07 PM, Gorgon said:

Note: Though Lian-Li claims you can use 4 x 3.5" drives actually installing two of them on the side mount requires using just the end cable for SATA Power (or modifying an existing cable cutting off the later connectors) and over-bending the SATA data cable in order to fit the connections to the lower 3.5" disk mounted with the connectors at the top due to how close the drove mounts are to each other. A 90 degree SATA Data connection reversed from the normal orientation would be useful here.

 

Silverstone CP11 cables should help with that, though they seem to be harder to get ahold of than they used to be.

[Gorgon]

3 hours ago, DJ46 said:

Silverstone CP11 cables should help with that, though they seem to be harder to get ahold of than they used to be.

Thanks for the suggestion. Amazon and NewEgg have the CP-11B -300 and -500 models in stock in Canada. The only downsides I can see is the lack of a locking mechanism and trading off not being cramped at the drive side to being cramped at the motherboard side but it looks like though it is again a tight squeeze it is less of a squeeze than with stock cables.

[DJ46]

2 hours ago, Gorgon said:

Thanks for the suggestion. Amazon and NewEgg have the CP-11B -300 and -500 models in stock in Canada. The only downsides I can see is the lack of a locking mechanism and trading off not being cramped at the drive side to being cramped at the motherboard side but it looks like though it is again a tight squeeze it is less of a squeeze than with stock cables.

The pictures of how cramped they are at the motherboard are part of their marketing, so I would hope that they can take the bends forced on them by the connectors.

For what it's worth, I would trust them more than a typical cable.