This is going to be fun!

Enjoy!

I was also interviewed and actually gave an overclocking demo in this video:

Unfortunately my board ended up dying about 20 minutes before I was supposed to start, so I had to quickly use someone else’s setup. He informed me that he wasn’t able to get his running over 6.3ghz, so I only pushed to about 6.1ghz on stream. Funny enough, after the stream I was able to easily get the system to 6.9ghz without issue.

All in all, it was a ton of fun. I met a ton of great folks and look forward to the next event.

Special thanks to JJ and Juno from ASUS for being amazing hosts, and Jaicheng for getting everything set up!

Here’s some pictures from the event:

• ASUS's Studio at Night
• Googly-Eyed Fish
• Me, Pouring LN2
• Me, Torching my LN2 Pot
• My LN2 Pot with Blue LEDs
• My LN2 Pot with RGB
• Our XOC Team
• PCDIY Exterior

Work

I took a new position at a wonderful company in August of 2021, and have been having a wonderful time. I currently manage a wonderful team of individuals that are doing incredible things. I have nothing but good things to say about my new role. It’s been an absolute dream come true!

Play

Beverages

I now have memberships to the following breweries/meaderies:

• Horus
• The Bruery
• Superstition Meadery

All of them are amazing and I look forward to getting all my tasty beverages!

Overclocking

I did take a bit of a break for a few months because of travel and work. Getting up-to-speed on a new position was just taking far too much out of me. Sorry for going dark for as long as I did. I’ve been back on it almost every week since March! Come watch me do crazy things Friday Nights at 7pm MST (GMT-0700) on Twitch!! I’ve been pushing so hard for global records and am getting very close to getting to the top of 3dmark’s CPU Profile benchmark. I’m planning on branching out to other benchmarks soon over on HWBOT.

Other cool things I got to do is represent Team USA on the HWBOT Country Cup! Unfortunately, my lack of hardware meant I was only able to do one bench, which ended up both being the winning score, and happened to be 6th in the world globally!!

I also updated my XOC page to match my current hardware inventory and records if you’re interested in catching up.

“The Brand” and the Future..

I’ve been working on my “brand” very hard for the past couple of months and actually received some amazing hardware from multiple vendors. I now have a Facebook Page, and have been trying very hard to remember to upload my VODs post-stream to Youtube. I’ll eventually get to actually cutting up videos and making content over there as I have more time.

Financially, I am completely operating at a loss. It’s not profiitable enough for me to give up my day job. It’s still amazing to do but I really need to work on branching out beyond my niche more. I’m also planning on trying to do more interviews with other overclockers or people in the technology community.

Thank you all for your support and hope that I can continue to grow!

Work’s been going well. I recently worked on developing a bosh release for Presto, which is being used as a sql frontend to s3 allowing us to query against large datasets in a relatively minimal amount of time. I’m planning on writing a few talks around some of the cool stuff I’ve been doing. Also starting to look at a world post-bosh, as vmware’s made it pretty clear it has zero interest in continuing to support what is arguably the most powerful lifecycle tool on the market right now.

That being said, I can’t complain. Currently in 17th place on Port Royal, pulled 12th in the world on the Time Spy Graphics score, and currently hold 1st place in the world on the new Wild Life Extreme Benchmark.

I also received a donation of a dewar last week. Unfortunately it was used, and still had “samples” in it that were as old as 1988. I was mildly horrified and was able to clean it out with lots of bleach and get that shame washed away. I’m going to try and fill it today for the first time. Hopefully the seal’s still good on it. Regardless, I’ll end up finding out pretty quick (yikes).

This week, I’m giving the GPU a rest and teaching myself CPU LN2 Overclocking. I’m going to try doing some cinebench cpu runs with my new Reaktor 3.0 LN2 Pot!

Here’s hoping for a fun week!

Description of the Original Project

I wanted a single system that I could do all my processing on a single system. I spent a few quarters’ worth of bonus money getting all the parts together, and built an incredible system. The parts list is available to view in the “My Homelab Link” at the top of my page.

The expectation was that I would have a stable system that I could run 2 “stations” off of. One for gaming, and one for work. While largely successful, there were issues which made this difficult, which I’ll go into more detail on below.

What worked

Having everything on a 32 core system with 256gb of ram was great. I could spin up and down vms at will, and was only limited by the speed of the actual cores and memory. It made my life much easier when I was designing and building new bosh releases, as I could save on overall cloud cost and speed. It was nice being able to really push and see what I could do in the environment. Given that I was running of 10GBe NAS and booting from a USB stick, meant that upgrading was super simple. Can’t ever go wrong there. The system in it’s current form is pretty darn close to rock solid. It is a compute dream.

What didn’t work

This one is a bit more complicated. Because my original expecatation was to be able to run 2 workstations off a single pc, I targetted the Nvidia Quadro RTX series graphics cards, as they had built-in USB that could be passed through to the VM. All-in-one solution. Great, right? Wrong. The USB wasn’t great. Not sure what chipset they’re using, but it was flakey at best in passthrough mode, and would constantly disconnect at inconvenient times. Eventually it got to the point where I was having to reconnect my USB hubs almost hourly. On top of that I was also getting random crashes as a result of the actual GPUs themselves sending error codes to the motherboard, making stability a problem after a while. The actual cards themselves were running cool, but for some reason they were causing system instability. Plus, in linux passthrough, the GPUs just weren’t as performant as an actual physical system.

The Solution

After finally giving up on AMD platform for benchmarking, along with replacing my 3090 ftw3 card, I had a lot of extra hardware sitting around. I had picked up a 5800x off a newegg deal to see if I could get better performance out of the system if everything was on the same die, instead of being split between infinity fabric. Unfortunately, the tests were coming out about the same, and I eventually decommissioned the AMD motherboards and cpus.

They had been sitting in their boxes for a month, and I wanted a new project. I decided I would spend a little money and build 2 new systems. A flashy gaming system with watercooling, reusing parts I already had, and a new workstation for myself to replace the linux vm I’d been using for work since Mid-november.

Now it’s time to do the actual builds.

Parts list

Most of the technical decisions I made on hardware was for the sake of simplicity, and what was available.

Gaming PC

• Corsair 4000D case - Great case! well-built and relatively inexpensive. Also was available at Best Buy.
• AMD 5900x
• Asus ROG Crosshair VII Dark Hero
• 16GB DDR4 4000 RAM (c15) - The leftovers binned out from the racecar. Can’t get them to really overclock, but that’s fine for this build.
• EVGA 3090 FTW3 ultra gaming with EK block
• 360mm Radiator
• 3x Arctic 120MM fans
• 2x Corsair fans that came with the case.
• EK flat pump/res combo
• EK CPU block
• Sexy black tubing and quick disconnects.
• Avermedia GC553 USB and GC573 PCIE for video capture.
• 750w PSU

The system is fast, pretty, and exactly what I want/need to play games and stream. Works great, has lots of connectivity, and does the job exactly how I would want it done. While I think a 3090 is complete overkill, I know that it’s future-proofed and should last me for at least the next 4-5 years before I have to consider upgrading. That’s good enough for me.

Workstation PC

• Corsair 4000D case
• AMD 5800x
• MSI X590-A something-something motherboard
• 64GB DDR4 3600 RAM (4x16, c18) - it was cheap and on sale at Best Buy.
• Simple CPU air cooler. I believe it’s a coolermaster. It was 20 bucks and on sale.
• 1TB WD Black m.2 PCIE SSD - Again, on sale.
• 3x Arctic 120mm PWM fans
• 2x corsair fans that came with the case
• Quadro RTX 4000
• 850w PSU

Now you’re probably asking yourself, “Self, why did he go with a larger psu on this system than the other?” The answer is simple, it’s the parts that they had available at the time. Either PSU would have worked fine in either build, but I was contemplating wanting to also put the quadro rtx 5000 in this system at a later time for ML/AI processing, so I opted to put the 850w psu into the workstation. I didn’t go super sexy with the build, as I wanted this to be a work horse. No need for sexy water cooling as air would do the job well enough. The quadro rtx 4000 is perfect for running my dual 4k monitors on my work desk, and decodes 4k videos off youtube without stutter. I spent for the extra memory as a buffer in case I ever convert this system into an esxi host down the line. While not the fastest, it’s fine for a linux desktop machine.

The builds

While I had originally wanted to build these the day BlizzCon 2021 started, I ended up only getting one system done. The other was a few weeks later. I had already committed to re-streaming the event using windows vms for each of the different panels for our internal groups to watch together. One for the main stage, warcraft, diablo, overwatch, hearthstone, and other. I ran out of time and kind of rushed getting the initial build together, making the cables and pump just kind of “in” the system so I could get everything up and running for the event. Was hacky, but worked.

A couple of weeks later, I finally got better tubing in and got my actual runs right, and everything looks much better. After I finished that build I did the linux workstation.

I used Clonezilla to transfer my workstation vm from the old pc to the new. Once the process was finished, I fixed the grub boot partition using an ubuntu bootable usb and everything came up fine. The system was relatively stable other than the wired network driver having disconnect issues. I installed the r8169-dkms package and everything’s good to go. Nice and fast, XMP enabled, booted right up and had no complaints since.

I do still use the USB hub, as my system is sitting on top of the rack a few feet away from my desk, but I’ve not had disconnect issues since the upgrade. Even got to finally stop using a bluetooth USB dongle for audio from my headset.

The windows system, I didn’t even bother to migrate. It’s old and needed to be rebuilt anyhow. Ended up just getting any personal data off the disk and wiping it. Most of it was already synchronized to NAS and encrypted at rest anyhow.

I do keep the windows VM around though, primarily for transcoding.

Conclusion

My homelab system is still amazing, and I’ll use it until the components die. It’s been rock solid since I removed the GPUs from it. This also freed up 64GB of ram for more virtual machines, which I’ve been using to quickly test pcf deployment automation pipelines as of late.

While the project will always be near and dear to my heart, I probably wouldn’t repeat it. I needed something to take my mind off my shoulder and show me that I still had the ability and skill to do something that very few people had ever done before. I got 2 incredible stations set up, with 2 different uses. I also have more near-silent compute power than most people will ever need in their house.

I will not forget the time and effort I put into the system, and how the build helped me through a difficult time in my life. It was worth the effort, and I am thankful for the experience.

The last 6 months have taught me that Linux is indeed ready to be a permanent workstation and replacement for my mac laptop. Windows is most definitely not a very good development platform unless you’re working specifically with windows.

Hrm. What should I build next?

Goals

1. I want to run an entire development environment locally on my systems

This is serious business. I can’t sit around and wait for AWS, Azure, or GCP to maybe spin up vms. I also don’t want to get charged for leaving vms just sitting out there running for extended periods of time that I don’t need. Doing it in-house is faster and a heck of a lot cheaper.

2. That server needs to be quiet.

It’s in my office, so I couldn’t go full-server. Most are loud and unruly, so building my own was the way I wanted to go.

3. I want a single system that can handle all my hobbies and daily tasks.

This was a personal challenge to myself. I wanted it to do it all, and for the most part it does.

4. I want it to sit in a rack.

Hard requirement. Nothing goes on the floor. I have a rack, so I might as well use a rack.

Hardware

Current Specs

Case: Chenbro RM41300-FS81

I chose this case for one simple reason: It could fit an XL-ATX motherboard. Having that extra slot means that I can fit a total of 4x 2 slot PCIE 4.x cards. Secondly, the case looked pretty easy to gut, and had a lot of space for adding new toys.

CPU: AMD Threadripper 3970x

I wanted something fast with high cores. I also considered going with an Intel I9-10980XE, but sourcing one at close to MSRP was close to impossible in early 2020. The 3970x cost more, but was priced right.

Motherboard: Asroc Rack TRX40D8-2N2T

When this board was announced back in May of 2020, it had a few killer features that made me immediately fall in love with it.

• Integrated dual 10GB and 2.5GB Ethernet
• Internal USB ports
• Integrated BMC/KVM/Video out

One feature that’s lacking on threadripper is no integrated graphics, so once esxi booted up, and it passed through to the graphics card, you’d lose console access. This allows you to get it back. Also, the layout is better for rackmount servers, as the chip and RAM are rotated 90 degrees. That’s a very sexy feature to have when you’re blowing air through the motherboard.

RAM: 256GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000mhz C16 (8x32gb)

This was really because this was the fastest ram that I could find at the time I started this build that wasn’t prohibitively expensive. Nowadays there’s 4000mhz kits that are maybe 60 dollars more per 128GB set. I’m already invested in this RAM, so I won’t be changing it out. No frills, rock-solid ram.

Graphics Cards

Virtualizing Geforce cards is blocked at the driver level, and while there are workarounds, in my experience, it was very buggy. This system was going to make me lose performance compared to my gaming system, which had dual 2080TIs in SLi. Why not ATI? The VFIO Reset Bug. Pretty simple.

Nvidia Quadro RTX 5000

I wanted the most bang-for-the-buck as possible. The RTX 6000, which would have been equivalent performance to a single 2080ti, cost $3000 for a USED card. This was available on eBay for about $1400. The system needed to perform, but I know I couldn’t sleep at night knowing that I just spent 3 grand on a graphics card that cost more than both of my old gpus. I use this gpu primarily for ML and gaming. For ML, it’s attached to a linux vm that I do my processing on, and for gaming, it’s attached to a windows vm. Simple enough use case. Works great, works simple, and fits in nicely. Even threw a nice water block on it. :)

Nvidia Quadro RTX 4000

I wanted to replace my work laptop with a more powerful linux vm, and migreate my development onto the homelab. My mac was starting to misbehave because of battery problems and I knew I would have to send it out for repair, so I picked up another quadro card. Why reinvent the wheel?

Got it cheap off ebay. It’s about equivalent to a 2070 super, and single slot. Great performance. Added bonus is that I now have 2 workstations running off the same system.

Liquid cooling:

Because why not? I said I wanted it to be quiet, right?

• EKWB CPU Block - Gotta go with the best here.
• Corsair XD3 Res/Pump combo - I wanted something low profile that fit in a rack.
• Soft tubing - because it’s in a rack. You won’t see it anyhow
• Alphacool Nexxos ST30 radiator
• Alphacool Eisblock ES Acetal GPU Block - This fits the quadro 5000 series card perfectly!
• Be Quiet! 2000 RPM Fans (2x80mm for exhaust, 3x120mm for the radiator)- because quiet. I’ve noticed a bit of overheating on the VRMs and I will be replacing the 120mm fans with 3000rpm Noctua fans soon, to move a bit more air.

Power Supply: NZXT C850

Why only 850w? Because the total wattage under 100% load on all parts of the system is only 710w. I used math. Plus it’s a rebrand of the Seasonic Gold, and was actually available at the time I was building this. All those factors made this an easy choice.

Gaming Monitors: 4x 27’ monoprice TN 1440p 144hz monitors

Great monitors for the price. I actually own 6 of them. 2 of them are on my wife’s machine. I have 4 of them in a 2x2 pattern on my work desk. All hooked up via Displayport. The colors on them are fine, the viewing angles are pretty top notch for TN panels and the fast refresh rate makes gaming on them good.

Work monitors: 2x 27’ LG 4k 60hz monitors

4k is great when you’re working. 60hz refresh rate is fine for watching videos and staring at text. 27 seems to be a nice sweet spot. My only complaint is that they aren’t curved. If I do upgrade, I would go with larger, curved monitors for better viewing angles.

USB Peripherals:

USBC from nvidia cards to USB hubs - Everything runs off a usb hub. Not much to say. The built-in usb c port on the gpu passes through great, and allows me to hook up my peripherals without having to mess with passthrough on both systems. I did try a few different pcie usb controllers, but none were terribly stable in esxi This works well enough.

Infrastructure

Rack: Dell 24U rack

I found it on craigslist for 160. Works great.

PDUs: 4x dell 6016 PDUs (5-port)

Found them on ebay for 50 bucks. I used them back when I used to actually build servers. Great PDUs.

Network: 10GB

This was a requirement I built into. Originally built the system out to use local SSDs, but wasn’t thrilled with performance. I ended up moving the disks to a NAS for speed and redudancy.

Router: Unifi UDM Pro

I wanted a high quality 10GB router that I could use to do all the things.I have a 10GB gateway that allows fast network between all my things.

Switch: Mikrotik CRS309-1G-8S+IN

Originally, I was planning on using this as a 10gb router. It’s a 9 port 10GB switch with routing capability. Quite simply, it couldn’t keep up with my infrastructure in routing mode, so I ended up just using it as a switch. I have a single 10-gig uplink between the UDM pro and this switch for traffic.

Wifi Access Points: 3x Unifi Nano-HD Access Points

I mean, if you have a UDM pro, you might as well get the access points too, right? 3x Access points covers my house perfectly. It’s long, L-Shaped, and Stucco. 2 downstairs, 1 upstairs in the loft. Not much else to say. They’re rock solid.

NAS: Qnap TS932X with 9x 1TB WD Digital Blue SATA SSDs and 16GB RAM (Upgrade)

Why did I choose this NAS? I don’t need virtualization, so that cut down the price by about 500 bucks. This had dual 10GB SFP+ ports and was super easy to set up. I use RAID6 for my disk configuration, for a total of 7TB usable. More than enough for gaming and vms. I upgraded the ram as I was seeing problems with the intial 4GB running out of memory during high-write operations. Works great, and great performance for less than half what the intel-based model cost.

Cable Modem: Arris S33

So, why not get a new cable modem that has 2.5gbps network built in? I’ve got gigabit cable, but losing on that top end. Might as well upgrade and actually get that full gigabit speed, right?

The junkyard

This is where things that I originally bought for the project go to die. I may or may not have sold these items. They just didn’t work out or were replaced by better.

Gaming System: i9-9900k, 32GB RAM, Dual Nvidia Geforce 2080ti GPUs

This was the original system I built and used as my gaming box for about 2 years. At one point, it had 6x 1440p screens attached to it. Hell of a chip in that one. I could get it to stay stable at 5.3ghz without messing with the voltage. This has been transplanted into a much nicer case and is currently in use by my spousal unit as her gaming machine, minus the 1 GPU that I ended up selling about a week before the 3000-series announcement came out. This bad boy started to really struggle over 20 vms and I wasn’t able to put more than a maximum of 128GB ram in it. Out with the old, in with the new.

Case: Be Quiet Dark Base Pro 900, rev.2

Great case, if you’re into cases. Terrible case if you’re into fiddling with your stuff after it’s put into the case. Hot, but quiet. The RGB controller ended up dying at some point, and it’s now in the graveyard. Plus, the rackmount case gave me much better form factor. That thing was big and heavy. Loved the case, hated building in the case.

Gigabyte Aorus TRX40 Designare

Great board. Big board. Not a board made for doing server stuff. No IPMI, BMC, or fast networking. When the Asrock Rack board was announced, this one was destined for the yard. Had some cool features, like supporting thunderbolt 3 (which did work in esxi, btw) Ended up selling this one.

Network card: dual 10gbe isci offload card

I can’t remember the model, but it didn’t work very well. It ended up in the pile.

SCSI Controller: LSI 9260-8i

Once I went to the NAS, this went to the yard. Rock solid card, and I would recommend it.

Final notes

As I said above, this was a personal challenge, just to see if I could do it. After breaking my shoulder last year, I needed a project. This definitely fit the bill for that. It’s faster than I could have ever imagined, I can throw more at it than ever expected, and more powerful than I could have ever dreamed. I’m not recommending you spec your system out anywhere near this. You can get better performance for under $2000 if you’re only looking to game. This was my project I did to prove to myself that I truly have still got it.

My next project is going to be extreme overclocking. I’ll be posting more on that in the future.

I put up sound foam covering about 1/4 of my office on Wednesday, and also ended up working a 16 hour day.

Then thursday I was running around like crazy all afternoon with my wife, making up for the time lost on Wednesday.

It’s the end of the day on friday, and all I want to do is sit on the couch and watch television.

So much work left to do. So many bins to fill. So many beverages to drink. Just tired.

So for tech news, I upgraded my cable modem. Went from a docsis 3.1 with dual 1gbe connections to a docsis 3.1 with a 2.5gbe port. Finally broke the 1000mbps barrier on speedtest. Can’t complain at all.

So I guess I’ll get back to work in my office either later tonight or tomorrow. I want to be able to play wow and not feel guilty that there’s junk on the floor.

Feel free to use as you wish.

# Set powershell policies.
Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072

# Install Chocolatey.
iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

# Disable global confirmation. (No need to use -y)
choco feature enable -n allowGlobalConfirmation

# Install software.
choco install googlechrome
choco install firefox
choco install Zzip
choco install vlc
choco install battle.net
choco install steam

Save this to something like install.ps1.

Run as Administrator.