11k Render Machine

[RogerDeath]

So two weeks ago (or so) I made a topic featuring a build that the Computer Science department would be building. The total cost? Nearly $12k by the end of everything (wrong parts & additions). Now we finally have all the parts in and we have been working on building it. While I don't have pictures of everything as it came in the box, but I do have a good few pictures that I managed to take. Due to the size of these pictures I decided on hosting them over on Photobucket here as a private shared album. When you go to look at it, Photobucket will ask for a password (in this case its OCC) to access it. We are having issues getting it to turn on ATM but we are continuing at it! SSD and optical drive have yet to be added, but should be in once we know for sure that we will have it so that this computer will post past the BIOS.

 

And yes, I know that it "was a waste of money" and it will use tons of power and create tons of heat. Don't even bother mentioning it here.

 

 

 

Link to old "bashing" thread here.

Edited September 30, 2010 by RogerDeath

[El_Capitan]

I'll trade ya?

[ARandomOWL]

Wow that's an incredible waste of power. It's gonna put out so much heat!

 

Anyway... Specs? What will it be used for? Link to the other thread if it's already been mentioned Sure is a monster.

[ir_cow]

besides the fact 1 psu won't be able to handle that rig you need a big fan directly on the 480s otherwise they will overheat and crash the system before it can do anything. i won't say what i think since everyone including me already said enough.

 

edit: on second thought you gonna watercool that rig? it would be fun to see how much more money can be thrown again

 

edit 2: if your having troubles actually getting it to boot try the bare min and do with 1 video card and 1 stick of ram. maybe out of all that stuff something is DOA...

Edited September 29, 2010 by hornybluecow

[BizaroStormy]

Is this the rig without ECC ram? If it does not have ECC ram than you wasted your time and money.

The only thing this thing could possibly be used for is some serious CUDA computing but if you were going to use it for that than you don't need(can't use) the SLI bridge if I remember correctly.

So what is it being used for?

[ir_cow]

i think he went without ECC ram and still managed to spend like 2k on it lol

 

"Memory G.SKILL Trident+ Turbulence II 24GB (6 x 4GB) 1299.99 2 2599.98 Newegg"

 

Heres the old bashing thread no one knows what its being used for yet but the Telsa Cards would have been a better option or overall cheaper if its going to be used for CUDA. Also the fact that normal Femi cards don't have ECC memory so big projects costing $$$ may have errors which is why Telsa is for CUDA and Quadro for for Graphical work.

Edited September 29, 2010 by hornybluecow

[Waco]

Heres the old bashing thread no one knows what its being used for yet but the Telsa Cards would have been a better option or overall cheaper if its going to be used for CUDA. Also the fact that normal Femi cards don't have ECC memory so big projects costing $$$ may have errors which is why Telsa is for CUDA and Quadro for for Graphical work.

He did call it a render machine in this thread - so at least it'll be okay without the ECC on the cards...

 

 

As for the issues turning it on - do a bare minimum test first and work your way up. I hope you won't be stressing the cards too much with that PSU though.

[hardnrg]

I know you already will, but disregard anything anyone says about it being a waste of money or a heat/power monster... I've attended NVidia supercomputing seminars (fairly small, about 100 attendees) and a couple of the example CUDA supercomputers were a VERY similar set-up, this was a while ago so it was 3x dual slot pre-release Fermi cards, and a single slot Fermi card too (I think just down to the fact it was a 7 PCI backplate case)

 

How does everyone know what PSU it is? lol, I can't see it... Obviously, you *can* power such a machine with a capable single PSU, and I've seen it with my own eyes, with scientists running simulations 24/7 full load CPUs *AND* GPUs...

 

The boot issues could easily be a simple BIOS setting like, maybe you need to manually set the vDIMM up over the default to run all six slots... or maybe you need to increase a chipset voltage to run four graphics cards... etc etc... I'd start with one stick of RAM and one graphics card and work my way up... default/auto BIOS settings are almost certainly the problem (unless it's the mysterious secret PSU being under-powered)

[Waco]

How does everyone know what PSU it is? lol, I can't see it...

Because he told us already. It's 1200 watts: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817438003

 

I've been to supercomputing stuff too - rarely (if ever) do you see consumer cards in anything that demands accurate results. Anyway - pretty sure he's just rendering stuff with it per the title of this thread.

Edited September 30, 2010 by Waco

[RogerDeath]

@Waco: Yep, this time we got the right PSU. Managed to hook everything up without using any extra cables (yet) since this PSU was literally made for this motherboard.

 

@Everybody: So it was figured out why the computer wouldn't even boot. One or more graphics cards were not plugged in completely in the PCI-E slot (whoops). So I'm going to be looking at it again in about an hour so I'll keep you guys up-to-date about whats going on. If I can't get it working then this thing will end up sitting there until Monday collecting dust.

 

Also, I now get to see just how far I can take the CPUs on this guy without temps getting too high and it remains stable. Gonna be interesting working on two CPUs at the same time....

[Locutus]

Need to do F@H for about 3 hours on all of the cores, and see what kind of PPD that monster can push out (just for crap and giggles, you know.)

[endorphiend]

Need to do F@H for about 3 hours on all of the cores, and see what kind of PPD that monster can push out (just for crap and giggles, you know.)