- Back in 2017, I built what, at the time,
seemed to be essentially the fastest possible server
for transcoding our massive cineform raw export files.
We're talking fifty to seventy gigabytes
into H.264 MP4s that we could upload to YouTube.
At the time, while it was a little janky,
the performance was basically as good as I could get.
Then I went to upgrade it about a year ago,
testing both a 5.1ghz binned, overclocked 9900k,
as well as the limited run, auction only 9990 xe,
a 14 core chip capable of 5ghz on all cores,
and honestly, the results were appalling.
Neither of the two flagship CPUs
were able to offer much more than a ten percent improvement
to our transcoding times,
making it seem like we had sorta hit a wall.
But in that video, I did promise you guys a followup,
building up that serve in a sick
custom water cooled chassis.
And we're going to do that but with a twist.
Now that Ryzen 3000 series processors are out
and matures a little bit,
we're going to take another crack at upgrading this machine.
We're going to test top of the line Ryzen
against the top of the line Intel
to see who wins in a heavy weight encoding showdown.
And what better way to do it then to retrofit
our old Minecraft server chassis
As many of you know, the ultimate Minecraft server chassis
was designed and fabbed with the help of Protocase,
and was pretty purpose built around
holding two ITX motherboards.
And I can assure you guys that, um,
this Threadripper sized socket is never coming
to an ITX motherboard.
Jake realized that by removing
just one of our three sandwiched radiators
in the front though, along with some minor modifications
to the motherboard whole layout,
we could actually easily fit both a full sized motherboard
and a compact GPU.
Woo!
And that is something we are going to need
to be able to run our CPU of choice,
the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X.
This is AMD's second from the top Ryzen 3rd gen CPU
with an astonishing 32 cores that,
at least according to Puget Systems,
trades blows with even their top dog 65 core 3990X,
At least for Adobe Premier exports.
And given the price difference, we're going to stick
with the 32 core variant, even if it means
taking a few seconds longer on our renders.
So I've got the chassis here.
I've got all the bits to put together here
and off camera over there,
so let's build a water cooled server, shall we?
Let's start by taking a look at the care package
Jake sent over to me.
We've got three 80 mm Noctua cooling fans
in the front of our chassis here,
along with this really sweet AlphaCool reservoir
that's easy to fill.
So you just fill it up through the top here.
And easy to check your coolant levels
with the handy dandy little window in the front.
And we've got a D5 pump wired into the back of it.
We've got a Corsair fan and RGB lighting controller here.
And then we've got another eight 80 mm fans
between these two 80 mm AlphaCool sandwiched radiators.
So between these three banks of fans
we're trying to draw air in from the front of the chassis
and then send it over the motherboard and out the back.
And then most of the cooling
is going to be handled right here
because both our CPU and graphics card
are going to be water cooled.
With that sorted out, it's time to throw in our motherboard.
Now, you might have noticed that, um,
we actually didn't bother to change up the back panel here
to make room for our full size ATX IO.
And the reason for that is that honestly speaking
it just doesn't matter.
The only card we're going to install on this
is a graphics card.
And we're going to be using a PCI Express extension cable
in order to do that.
So we'll deal with that later.
First, let's go ahead and get the motherboard screwed in.
Our reasons for choosing the ROG Strix TRX40-E Gaming
are pretty straightforward.
We wanted something that wasn't pseudo EATX,
so wider, cause that would have interfered
with our ability to mount our graphics card
and our power supply.
And we wanted something with 2.5 gig ethernet built in,
so that we wouldn't need to modify the chassis
to put in a faster network card.
Not that it really matters.
I mean nothing we're doing requires greater than
gigabit transfer speeds anyway,
but it's just kind of a nice to have.
Well, I'm not sure if this is the way
I would have preferred to have it done,
but it seems like Jake intends
for me to mount the graphics card with some VHB tape
on these 3D printed spacers.
Um, there are screw holes here which is curious.
But we apparently will not be (laughs) using them.
Our intention had been to go with a RTX 2060 for this build,
but it did not arrive in time.
Thanks COVID-19!
So we've got this Zotac Geforce GTX 1080 Ti.
Now you might think, "Oh, well not having RTX means
"that you also don't have the new NVENC encoder."
But that's okay.
We're just using the cudacores on the GPU
as opposed to the fixed function hardware encoder.
So it really shouldn't matter
as long as we have enough GPU performance,
at least according to our findings, um, on this topic.
(inhales loudly) I guess that was two or three years ago.
For our power supply, we actually downgraded
in a certain sense compared
to the Minecraft server that we built.
This is Corsairs SF750,
and it's a 750 rather than an 800 watt unit,
but unlike those Silverstone units we used before
this has duel eight pin EPS connectors,
which both our AMD and Intel HD platforms require.
Just gonna mount it fan side up
so that it gets to suck in some of the air
that's being blown over the system
by these 80 mm cooling fans.
And we're gonna go ahead
and use the same mounting screws once again.
To actually plug the power supply in though,
we've gotta go ahead
and run this right angle power connector
through the hole in the back of the chassis.
Then we get our plug correctly installed on the outside.
We just pull up the power supply,
plug the right angle connector in.
Make sure the power supply is powered on,
cause we're not really going to be able
to get at that switch later
Oh actually it's not that hard to get it, nevermind.
So we're going to leave it off
cause that's a little bit safer when you're still
building the computer.
And then we can go ahead and screw this down.
To be very clear guys,
we know that this isn't server spec hardware,
and I keep calling it a server.
A server is more of a function.
And it will be serving a server role,
even if it is desktop or workstation class hardware.
Need to plug in USB for our fan controller.
Then we're going to run our SATA connector
around the power supply here,
which is sort of a weird cable management choice
on the surface, but it allows us to plug
just a basic SSD.
There we go.
In response to the onslaught of comments
that I'm sure are coming
over my double sided tape drive mounting,
there's nothing wrong with it.
With a harddrive, yes. Bad idea.
With an SSD, they're lightweight, there's no moving parts,
it's fine.
That leaves fixing up the water cooling tubes
as my last task here.
The outlet from our reservoir is this one over here.
So we're going to run that over to our graphics card
which is a non direction sensitive block.
So we're gonna go ahead and cut this off to size.
We're going to be off to the races pretty quick here.
(static noise)
Things, stop it.
That's what we're looking for,
move them bubbles through.
Thank you, thank you kindly.
Wow, you actually,
you set this up all like real nice for me and everything.
It's got the, the file all sitting there
ready to just press encode.
The only thing you didn't include was a SATA cable.
- I didn't include a SATA cable, what?
- It's okay, don't worry, don't worry,
I found a super stylish one, check this out.
- [Jake] Oh no!
This is like, I did that to myself.
That's so bad, oh man.
- [Jake] I think we should just leave it in there.
- Oh yeah. Heck yeah.
- On my side we've got Intel's flagship 10980XE;
that's an 18 core processor.
Along with a matching 1080 Ti, the same OS.
And media encoder ready to start this test,
so uh, you ready to lose.
I mean, probably, win.
- You're going down, you're going down bruh!
You're going down!
- You're definitely probably going to win.
- Alright, ready?
3, 2, 1 go!
- [Linus] So what is this?
This is a CineForm H.264 transcode?
- [Jake] Yeah, so it's taking the raw output
from one of our editor stations,
so it's going to be like a 50, 60GB file,
and trascoding it to H.264
so we can actually upload it to YouTube.
Our previous rendering server
probably would have done this video
in about 20 minutes, so-
- I think I'm going to be beating that time.
Um, my estimated time remaining is 10:26, how about you?
- Uh, I'm one minute into it;
Estimated remaining time is 14.
Oh, it's going down to 13,
but I mean it's Adobe, so it's all over the place.
- Yeah, fair enough.
- What's your RAM usage like?
- Uh, I'm at 16 gigs.
= Yeah, basically 16 gigs as well.
CPU usage somewhere between 60 to 70 percent.
- Wow, um, mine is at like 45, 50 (laughs).
- Um, what about GPU?
= Um, my GPU's kinda chilin'.
Bounces between 10 and 20 percent.
- Oh, I'm like pretty much always below 10.
- [Linus] Interesting.
- [Jake] 6 to 9 percent, huh.
- Kay, everyone quiet, quiet.
(phone ringing)
Pick up Jake.
Mine was too fast; it was too fast.
- [Linus] I finished 15 seconds ago.
- What?
- Yeah, you heard me.
- I still have four minutes remaining.
- Yeah, you got rekt then, didn't you?
- (laughs)
- 12 minutes 42 seconds.
- Ooh!
For comparison, I'm at 14 minutes,
and there's still three minutes remaining.
- That's crazy.
And the funny thing is, like yeah,
it's got, you know, whatever 80 percent more cores,
but it's usage was so low.
Like, it must just also be more efficient at encoding
on a per core basis.
- Well here, let me connect, let me connect
to our existing one and see if it's even done yet
because I bet you it's not.
Yeah, okay, so our existing server
which is running it right now, elapsed,
so far it's been 18 and a half minutes,
and there's 30 seconds left.
So it looks like about a 19 minute encode.
And then this one should be about 17 minutes.
So there was a little improvement
going from 7980XE to the 10980XE.
But the 3970X just wipes the floor with them.
So thanks for watching guys.
If you enjoy these kinds of server videos,
maybe check out our recent storage server upgrade,
uh, deploying nuwonic.