Post your battlestation.

Backlash wrote
Erika wrote

I got the Kraken kit and a 240mm ASUS AIO! Other than making the card a bit clunky to reinstall and having to dremel off some tabs on the card's heat spreader, the install went smoothly. Most importantly, it is dead silent. I loaded up Hell Let Loose, a game that used to take the card into the 90s, and it just sits there all happy and cool, never breaking 60C. I am very impressed at what an adapter kit and $100 AIO can do.

Dremeling pieces of your PC hardware? Hoh! Shucks love, I'm impressed myself! I decided to never even attempt custom watercooling 'cuz of the potential for leakage [and the expense~]. The thought of putting a power tool anywhere near my hardware is unthinkable, but it sounds like everything worked well in the end. ^~^

60C is an amazing temp for a GPU under full load. I'd love to know what kinda card it is, and if you had any benchmarks to share!

The dremeling was easy once I figured out why the cold plate wasn't making contact with the chip. Basically the heat spreader screws on all over the card, including 4 that extend in towards the GPU die area. Those were hitting the cold plate of the AIO, so instead of scrapping the whole heat spreader, I just removed it, sliced the stubs off, and screwed it back on. I'm sure it doesn't make a big difference now that the power delivery system and memory is getting nice, cool air blown on it instead of air that has been molested by the GPU's heatsinks. It's just a basic EVGA 1070 Ti underneath, the SC Black edition. The wetness is staining from the oil in the thermal pads, I couldn't easily remove it. If you have any recommendations for benchmarks, I'll run them.

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Backlash wrote

Going off a comment left by a retired sysadmin on Reddit, those kinds 'a setups were used extensively with 2.5" drives since they were faster to spin up and read. [ That's important to traders, it seems. ] Of course, when SSDs finally came, they blew mechanical drives outta the water, such that the guy I bought these from had, just, thousands of these lying around when he started selling them. Heh~, I won't complain.

Some of the flash based storage server stuff is crazy. I was talking to someone who bought some of it recently. It's basically like RAM in that the "drives" are all just flash storage chips and that's it. You plop them in like drives and the controllers are in the chassis. I do see a lot of 2.5" SAS 250GB drives at work though.

Erika wrote

I got the Kraken kit and a 240mm ASUS AIO! Other than making the card a bit clunky to reinstall and having to dremel off some tabs on the card's heat spreader, the install went smoothly. Most importantly, it is dead silent. I loaded up Hell Let Loose, a game that used to take the card into the 90s, and it just sits there all happy and cool, never breaking 60C. I am very impressed at what an adapter kit and $100 AIO can do.

Yeah, I got a Kraken kit for my 290X as well. Almost felt like I got a new GPU in some ways. No more throttling!

Backlash wrote
Erika wrote

I got the Kraken kit and a 240mm ASUS AIO! Other than making the card a bit clunky to reinstall and having to dremel off some tabs on the card's heat spreader, the install went smoothly. Most importantly, it is dead silent. I loaded up Hell Let Loose, a game that used to take the card into the 90s, and it just sits there all happy and cool, never breaking 60C. I am very impressed at what an adapter kit and $100 AIO can do.

Dremeling pieces of your PC hardware? Hoh! Shucks love, I'm impressed myself! I decided to never even attempt custom watercooling 'cuz of the potential for leakage [and the expense~]. The thought of putting a power tool anywhere near my hardware is unthinkable, but it sounds like everything worked well in the end. ^~^

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60C is an amazing temp for a GPU under full load. I'd love to know what kinda card it is, and if you had any benchmarks to share!

As for me, just yesterday I actually got my hands on a piece of server equipment from way back when. Specifically, a Dell H310 SAS controller!

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You know something's professional when it uses a green PCB, right~? Well, that or old.

Actually, about that protocol. I'd never heard of it before, but SAS was apparently an alternative to SATA that saw extensive use in the professional sector for its integrated support for RAID when connected to a backplane.

Going off a comment left by a retired sysadmin on Reddit, those kinds 'a setups were used extensively with 2.5" drives since they were faster to spin up and read. [ That's important to traders, it seems. ] Of course, when SSDs finally came, they blew mechanical drives outta the water, such that the guy I bought these from had, just, thousands of these lying around when he started selling them. Heh~, I won't complain.

How come you went for this one and not an LSI?

a month later
malmon wrote

How come you went for this one and not an LSI?

Eeeetou~... Mostly because I'm new to secondhand server hardware, saw a recommendation for these things on Reddit, and when I learned there's a guy who sold 100+ of these on eBay and had just under a half dozen left~, I snapped it right up... >~<'

But, you know, that's okay! While I might not get access to the advanced features of an LSI RAID card, it does do the job of hooking up additional hard drives, which will be great for a software data management scheme like unRAID's. I'll be trying that soon... ^~^

2 years later
4 years later

Backlash
Nice setup; how difficult is it to keep track of where the mouse is?

And, more importantly, how did you get this set up stable?

    Lets bring expectations down even further, shall we?

    Left to right: Printer, a 5 stack of BDXL's (100gb, m-disk, jewel cases), 4 switch games, 600 count 500mg acetaminophen (generic painkiller), yeti 42oz mug, 2023 mac mini, reimu knockoff fumo (kunfund), monitor, gamer's nexus desk mat, phone stand, shitty keyboard, marisa knockoff fumo (kunfund), BW-16D1X-U blu-ray writer, some deoderant, wifi antenna, mouse, speakers, other monitor, water

    ill add detail later if i feel like it.

    I don't care enough to fix the cable fuckening below the desk.

    I am unsure how to fix the airflow issue my case is having, which I caused by getting an AIO for my CPU without considering the overall impact on the case.