New Build - Ideas and Insight

[orl]

I couldn't really find any one topic this discussion will fit under, so I am putting it under the general AMD tab despite it kind of touching across the board of subjects.

So, recently when playing with Pop_OS! and comparing it against Manjaro (Linux for you sheltered Windblows folks) and fired up Steam to look into its integration, logged in and (re)discovered Steam Link by accident when it offered to stream the game from my desktop to my laptop on the other side of my house.  Initially I thought, hey that's cool for this aging Sagar laptop, let me give it a try.  I quickly realized my overpowered (for my games) desktop rendering the games in 4k then down sampling to the laptops 1080p screen was not only maxing out my laptops refresh/fps, it looked gorgeous with basically zero noticed input lag, only shooters revealed the lag and I basically never play shooters unless its some ancient single player or Black Mesa which recently went official, also being an ancient shooter (Half-life Remake).

This both inspired me, and made me respect some of what Google is doing with Stadia; a product that normally made me roll my eyes.  Suddenly it dawned on me, "Hey I can do this too!"  To top that off, I recently bought a house and have been in the initial stages of planning my (LAN) IOT smart house, so why not do both in one!?!.

My plan is to build out a system which will function as basically the brain of my house, the network, and all related features, while also being able to run and stream games to any device in my house with exceptional quality.

Now obviously, this is going to need to check a LOT of boxes from cooling to networking, to NAS, etc.  I figured why not start planning it here and compiling a list of ideas on each front while I renovate and run wiring etc to the patch panels I've integrated into the basement.

WHAT I HAVE AND AM PLANNING ON BUYING:

CPU: Ryzen 4k (Releases Sometime This Year)

MOBO: Undecided (This is tough as its going to need 2 separate NICs and fast ones, may require PCIe NIC expansion)

MEM: 32GB G.Skill Trident DDR4 (Already Have, Might have to change)

HDD: 10TB(20TB)R1 (Undecided Mass Storage)

SSD: 1TB Samsung 860 Pro (Gaming Drive, Already Have)

M.2: 500GB Samsung 970 Pro (OS Drive, Already Have)

GPU: AMDXXXX (This will be a future product, AMDs new software causes games to be much faster in Linux than in Windows and looks to define the gaming future)

PSU: Enermax or Silverstone Platinum Unit 1000W+ (Efficiency will be key here as there will be some overclocking/undervolting going on)

COOLING: H2O (See Description Below) (I already have all of this unless AMD throws a socket curveball)

Case: (Custom Build for H2O solution, See below)

UPS: Undecided (My APC UPS just kicked the bucket, may replace battery or buy new)

OS: Pop_OS! (This one seems ideal for Debian stability paired with bleeding edge hardware support from System76, plus they did a damned good job on it)

WHAT THIS SYSTEM HAS TO DO:

1. Operate as NAS (LAN) & VPN NAS (WAN) for mobile devices and FTP services.

2. Operate as my household Firewall (outgoing), it will also be sitting behind a physical firewall device (incoming) as IOT is notorious for infected botnet usage.

3. Operate as my household energy management system, it will be linked via wireless or wired to many devices in home, from radio to lights and HVAC.

4. Operate as a media center for my whole house, from TV duties to Radio and Streaming

5. Operate as a game streaming server to my TVs, laptop, mobile devices with controller support, achieved via Steam Link etc.

6. Run as efficiently as possible 24/7 with absolute maximum power reduction, while able to rev up and produce substantial performance in gaming for RPGs and MMOs.

So now comes my intention on how to build this cooling.  As I stated before my wife and I bought this house.  It has a partially finished basement, a particularly cool and dry basement temperature wise.  I was already going to rip the exterior dry wall off down there to replace insulation and add wiring as my wife wants shiplap on the wall.  So this gives me a unique opportunity to make an air channel that makes contact with underground temperatures.  My thoughts are to build a full H2O (CPU&GPU) loop with a 360x360 rad and fans set up to pull from the air gap along the sealed concrete wall, then add an intake on the same wall but other side of room.  While the basement wall will be sealed, I still will have the radiator away from the PC itself to avoid any unwanted humidity causing electrical corrosion, then just set up 1 or 2 exceptionally quite filtered fans to handle the actual PC case airflow itself. 

Ok, now that I wrote the book above, I would like some input on this idea.  I need some insight on challenges that may arise or should be looked into, I want to do this right and do it only once.  Give me your worst on the idea.

To start this off:

Do you guys think redundant pumps will be a good idea here with the extra length of tubes?

Has anyone ever tried running an extended video cable for 4k (20'-25' or so) and did it have issues?  I'm considering adding a main feed to the living room for 4k gaming on my TV and the other devices on the network.

How about software you have found that allows you to remotely network your mobile to the home PC in case you want to back something up, I'm considering something like KDE Connect through VPN but that seems slower than possible existing solutions.

[ShrimpBrime]

Well, in my humble opinion, Ryzen processors do not need liquid cooling unless you like the looks. It will do nothing for performance.

Ryzen 4000 series boards to be released with processors. Wait on that, I believe in matching chipset to cpu gen. Just less hassle that way.

[orl]

I personally love water-cooling my friend, plus I have a ridiculous amount of parts that would be almost shameful to leave unused as this build will replace my desktop. But my motivation with this setup is to essentially reduce airflow into the case, and subsequently reduce incoming dust. An external radiator can be cleaned easily with zero impact of loose dust inside the PC from the cleaning. I do mostly agree with you though, these new Ryzens don't see a huge thermal overhead for clocking, mine caps out well and far before it stresses my cooling, which admittedly ended up being overkill.

Which also gave me an idea, I could use a HVAC hepa filter at the intake.

[ShrimpBrime]

Jun 18, 2020 16:14:11 GMT -5 orl said:

I personally love water-cooling my friend, plus I have a ridiculous amount of parts that would be almost shameful to leave unused as this build will replace my desktop. But my motivation with this setup is to essentially reduce airflow into the case, and subsequently reduce incoming dust. An external radiator can be cleaned easily with zero impact of loose dust inside the PC from the cleaning. I do mostly agree with you though, these new Ryzens don't see a huge thermal overhead for clocking, mine caps out well and far before it stresses my cooling, which admittedly ended up being overkill.

Which also gave me an idea, I could use a HVAC hepa filter at the intake.

Filters create restriction. To overcome, more powerful fans. Then get additional noise. 
Noise doesn't bother me. I love the fans. I have a few Delta 1.6a 120mm that push so much CFM, they'd suck your Hepa filter right through the fan grills lol. 

I wonder if this is the part where my furnace blower picture falls in. Perhaps you could actually make an entire HVAC system for your rig with perhaps a portable AC unit or something?

[Mr.Scott]

Jun 18, 2020 16:51:00 GMT -5 ShrimpBrime said:

I wonder if this is the part where my furnace blower picture falls in. Perhaps you could actually make an entire HVAC system for your rig with perhaps a portable AC unit or something?

BOOM!! LOL

[ShrimpBrime]

Jun 18, 2020 16:55:19 GMT -5 Mr.Scott said:

Jun 18, 2020 16:51:00 GMT -5 ShrimpBrime said:

I wonder if this is the part where my furnace blower picture falls in. Perhaps you could actually make an entire HVAC system for your rig with perhaps a portable AC unit or something?

BOOM!! LOL

OMG rolling over laughing my ass off!!

Is that saved on your desktop Scotty? lol

[Mr.Scott]

It's in my picture file. Been saved off of 4 different dailys now.

[ShrimpBrime]

Jun 18, 2020 16:58:16 GMT -5 Mr.Scott said:

It's in my picture file. Been saved off of 4 different dailys now.

I use that blower at work every day. It still turns. The bearings are serviceable. 

[orl]

Shrimp, I got some delta fans as well from Brocade servicing, I wouldn't be surprised if they do 10k RPM. The Brocade devices were some 130Db at full power < 5', was deafening and knowing it was coming from those small fans was impressive. I always hated flipping the power on because it was uncomfortable, the fans came on roaring and anything loose in the system would blow right in your face. More than once if you didnt cover your face, you had watery itchy eyes. So glad I do not install telecom anymore!

[ShrimpBrime]

Do you remember those Tornado fans?? Luke (Sparkey247) took an entire finger nail off with on of those. I saw it. Lol.

[Vinster]

I have a few thoughts on this.

On the Build:

4000 AMD.. I'll be joining that club when it get here. planing my next build to go there...

MOBO/NIC's if the usage is heavy enough, look in the 2.5Gb/s Networking from this PC to a 2.5Gb/s Switch and then have all your devices connected to it over 1Gb/s. 2.5Gb/s networks still use CAT6 cabling and it's fine for all the devices to be limited to 100/1000Gb/s, but not your server as you'll have all those end-points connected. and really, 2.5Gb/s HW is at the upper end of reasonable now, esp. in the US... in Canada we're still getting hosed for the HW.

32GB of ram... why change? want something slower? Faster... on a server setup like you're describing you want stability over performance. I would run the ram at the CPU's rated/default speed.

HDD.. Raid 1 is fine.. but that is a lot of data to recover on large drives... I had a Raid10 setup at work and a 4TB drive failed. Took over 32 hours for it to recover... if you go this route I would recommend the hot-spare (or 2 if the card will support it, as soon as it starts seeing issues, it starts to rebuild... no fuss)... for an array that large I'd had defaulted to RAID 60... you might want to look at a redundant ZFS (Double parity recommended)

 - - - you should also have a backup setup going as well, something that updates to an external drive (possibly encrypted depending on your trust flavor)... I personally don't like encrypted as it's a pain if you can't find that USB key and need the data on recovery. also another backup method is to a cloud.. I have a 100GB Google drive and 65GB of it is my NAS backup... (Pure File Backup) it took 4-5 days to upload... but now it just maintains... if the PC is down, I can pull the file/email a link what-ever I still have access...

for data backups, depending on the OS, make sure you reserve some space for File History (old term was a "Shadow Copy") that remains in the background.. so you can do a single file recovery from the NAS OS instead of going to the external backup

Remember.. Redundant HDD's is for a hardware failure, not a software/file corruption... if 1 stick of RAM fails and starts randomly corrupting every file it access... you're only recovery is that External drive backup...  Been there... twice...

you don't have a file backup unless there is a backup of the backup.... then copy it again I can't tell you how many times that off the cuff backup copy saved me.

What it has to do:

Firewall.. this should be a stand-alone little box with a NIC in and a NIC out. small cheap left-over PC you have lying around. If the main system goes down you don't want to lose the firewall to the wireless network. Could even be a WRT/Tomato router... Then you can have two... both setup the same.. one start acting funny.. move a few plugs and you're back up.

NAS.. I'd also recommend that the NAS be it's own thing as well, Data can important (see HDD note above)

Media Center/ Game Streaming, HVAC. that can be this system... you'll want a 8 core + CPU, 32GB of ram will be good... OS and Gaming Drive to me are fine

Water cooling is fine, but less moving parts the better... my HTPC/Data Server started on air (was over heating)... then went AIO (Still overheating but not as bad), then went to a bigger AIO (would be fine 90% of the time, but still had temp problems), then went full custom (pump failure, RAD leak, bad coolant mix, list goes on)... then went to an oversized air cooler.... Haven't touched it in 3+ years.

Think about what this system will truly be... then imagine what life will look like if it goes down? what will the house reaction be.. use that to decide how you go...

But if you go custom... double pump. for sure... with shut-offs on either side so you can pull it out to fix it... then at that point, plan it so you can take each piece out without breaking anything down (like a car)... I'd recommend flow meters (passive visual and electronic tied to fan RPM input) also a water temp probe, again visual and RPM probe...

I love this kind of stuff so please make a build log, I'd love to follow along... this sounds like a fun project.

Vin

[orl]

Thanks for all of the insight Vin, this is going to be a big ol honking reply here so bear with me... see below!

Jun 18, 2020 19:44:10 GMT -5 Vinster said:

I have a few thoughts on this.

On the Build:

"MOBO/NIC's if the usage is heavy enough, look in the 2.5Gb/s Networking from this PC to a 2.5Gb/s Switch and then have all your devices connected to it over 1Gb/s. 2.5Gb/s networks still use CAT6 cabling and it's fine for all the devices to be limited to 100/1000Gb/s, but not your server as you'll have all those end-points connected. and really, 2.5Gb/s HW is at the upper end of reasonable now, esp. in the US... in Canada we're still getting hosed for the HW."  I completely agree on this, ( I should draw out my planned topology ), I actually have about 1000' of Cat7 in storage.  I also have Multi-Mode fiber capabilities, but would have to check what SFPs are available.  Pretty sure I can find (2) 10g SR Cisco SFPs floating around in a box somewhere and literally have an unlimited supply of LC|LC SB UPC OM4 fibers at my disposal.

"32GB of ram... why change? want something slower? Faster... on a server setup like you're describing you want stability over performance. I would run the ram at the CPU's rated/default speed."  Ram is something I'm still looking into, debating if I want to move to memory more server oriented stability or not, what I have is pretty good stuff though.

"HDD.. Raid 1 is fine.. but that is a lot of data to recover on large drives... I had a Raid10 setup at work and a 4TB drive failed. Took over 32 hours for it to recover... if you go this route I would recommend the hot-spare (or 2 if the card will support it, as soon as it starts seeing issues, it starts to rebuild... no fuss)... for an array that large I'd had defaulted to RAID 60... you might want to look at a redundant ZFS (Double parity recommended)" You know, its been so long since I've done a raid it wasn't until you said this that the alarms went off in my head about striping and parity, your absolutely correct and this will change.

 "- - - you should also have a backup setup going as well, something that updates to an external drive (possibly encrypted depending on your trust flavor)... I personally don't like encrypted as it's a pain if you can't find that USB key and need the data on recovery. also another backup method is to a cloud.. I have a 100GB Google drive and 65GB of it is my NAS backup... (Pure File Backup) it took 4-5 days to upload... but now it just maintains... if the PC is down, I can pull the file/email a link what-ever I still have access..."  I was already considering cloud for critical files and OS backups, alternatively if I go get a 120V | -48V DC Inverter, I could recycle some old data center equipment, but at the cost of drives its probably not worth it over monthly cloud fees. Electricity alone might be the cost of the cloud service, not to mention the latter parts.

"for data backups, depending on the OS, make sure you reserve some space for File History (old term was a "Shadow Copy") that remains in the background.. so you can do a single file recovery from the NAS OS instead of going to the external backup."  As you probably know, in Linux, this will be gravy baby.

"you don't have a file backup unless there is a backup of the backup.... then copy it again I can't tell you how many times that off the cuff backup copy saved me."  Will definitely take to heart.

What it has to do:

"Firewall.. this should be a stand-alone little box with a NIC in and a NIC out. small cheap left-over PC you have lying around. If the main system goes down you don't want to lose the firewall to the wireless network. Could even be a WRT/Tomato router... Then you can have two... both setup the same.. one start acting funny.. move a few plugs and you're back up."  I was looking at stand alone units already and separating the flow management between them as stated in original post.  It would have to be pretty cheap options though if I am going to run redundancy on the systems like that.

"Water cooling is fine, but less moving parts the better... my HTPC/Data Server started on air (was over heating)... then went AIO (Still overheating but not as bad), then went to a bigger AIO (would be fine 90% of the time, but still had temp problems), then went full custom (pump failure, RAD leak, bad coolant mix, list goes on)... then went to an oversized air cooler.... Haven't touched it in 3+ years."  H2O or bust man, every PC I've built in like 10 years has been on the float, not looking back now! As stated, there are plenty of supplies in my arsenal already owned for this as well.

"But if you go custom... double pump. for sure... with shut-offs on either side so you can pull it out to fix it... then at that point, plan it so you can take each piece out without breaking anything down (like a car)... I'd recommend flow meters (passive visual and electronic tied to fan RPM input) also a water temp probe, again visual and RPM probe..."  Of all my WC parts, quick disconnects are something I do not have, they are expensive.  This might just finally be the justification I needed to buy them.  Need to pick out the pumps though, as its another thing to buy, if I go DDC only need to buy one more pump and already own the tops, anything else its two pumps+tops.

"I love this kind of stuff so please make a build log, I'd love to follow along... this sounds like a fun project."  I will try, terrible at those.  I get grand plans and then start building and forget about the log.  Usually it goes something like "Heres the beginning of my log... and TADA! Here are finished pictures because doing the middle of the log interrupts the build!"

Vin

[Vinster]

I'm happy some of it was helpful... Sometimes I overdue it and all may ideas that spill out... I get passionate about build like this.. just love them

for the networking... 2.5Gb/s is a lot of speed... if you have or and can get the 10Gb HW at a good cost. great..

for the loop disconnects. I'm talking simple plastic ball valves at the garden supply... you just need to close the lines on either side so you can take the fittings apart... no need for that pricy QD stuff.. the loop you mention won't be small... so a 3" long ball valve will be easy to tuck in to a few spots from the sounds of it.

I'm the same way for build logs... Tada... lol It's all good.

Vin