Gadgetory

today's video is all about using the right hardware for the job so we actually learned a couple of years ago you can check that video up here if you want that just because you've got a workload that traditionally scales really well with lots of processor cores like video encoding doesn't necessarily mean that it will scale infinitely and we ran into a situation we're adding more processing course to our video encoding server actually resulted in significantly less performance for spending significantly more money so we actually found that the sweet spot was somewhere in the eight to ten core range with frequency actually being far more important than core count beyond that point fast forward a couple of years though and the 69 50 x10 core overclocked Extreme Edition processor that we equipped this thing with is not only no longer the ruler of the roost it's actually significantly slower than even consumer grade eight core chips that you can buy today for a fraction of the cost so we're gonna pull this bad boy out get it dust it off swap out some hardware and see just how fast we can make your fly uh you guys ready for me to pull down the render server all good sweet thanks guys speaking of all good LTT store.com is full of all good cool stuff like this hoodie the house still hoodie is finally in stock go check it out that's LTT store.com we're gonna have that linked in the video description before we go any further I feel like I should explain why we need a render server in the first place you might think well if you've got a powerful workstation surely you can cut together your video export it and upload it to YouTube all without sending it out to a separate server for processing and we could do that but there are some workflow advantages to doing things the way that we do so whether we're shooting on our reds or on our canon c 200s we take whatever file type that we originally shot we dumped it into our premiere project and we set premiere to use a Cinna form timeline so Cinna form is a mezzanine codec that has great performance on the timeline and it retains a great deal of the image quality from the original file it also has some other advantages so compared to codecs that use iframes like h.264 cinah form is much easier to kind of chop pieces out of without having to completely rerender your file so something that we can do is if we set our timeline to sunna form render all the files out in santa form and then make a change like pulling a sponsor spot out for flow plane we can very quickly export to different versions of that video without taking up a bunch of time on the editors workstation allowing them to get back to work now we could take that finished cinah form file and upload it directly to YouTube only problem is it's anywhere from 30 to 60 gigabytes for the average Linus tech tips video which even though our internet here is really fast still takes a long time to upload to youtube because there are transfer speed limits on their side so what we need to do that instead is take our Sena form file here you can see we're remoted into that server right now and convert it to h.264 which will not only upload faster on YouTube it will also process faster and more reliably here comes Oh Oh all right let's see how brutal this thing is inside ready wow that's actually not that bad it's almost like dust filters are a really really good idea so let's walk through how this thing was configured in the first place we've got a triple 120 millimeter fan with some of naktu as industrial PPC fans on it for cooling it's actually you can't really tell but it's it's lifted about this much off the bottom of the server chassis so that as these fans draw air through the front of the case these ones suck that cool air up through the radiator and then the warm air kind of gets blown along this way for our reservoir we went with a like a metal one because I didn't want any risk of leaking whatsoever you can see it actually has very little evaporation - which is really nice a d5 pump because reliability is absolutely the most important thing in a build like this and raid one drives those aren't that reliable if drives those are ten-year-old force 120 anyway it doesn't matter we've got 32 gigs of RAM this was the stuff we painted actually for a project quite a long time ago and then I went with a gtx 980 now normally you wouldn't need like a gaming graphics card in something like this but some of the workloads that it handles are cuda accelerated and we did get a performance improvement from that so we chucked it in there so the only things we're really replacing today are gonna be the motherboard the CPU and the memory and then I also grabbed a an RT X xx atti to see if maybe after we upgrade our CPU there could be some benefit from a faster GPU so let's get started so pretty much every aspect of this is getting an upgrade we are dropping down from 10 bores to a course but because they're faster ones I'm still expecting a performance improvement we're going from 26 66 megahertz memory all the way up to 32 hundred megahertz memory and that is with lower timings to boot and we're of course going from this older x99 motherboard to a new z 91 so let's hope that since my last project using this thing I had to ultimately pull it out of my system because of a thunderbolt snafu our our inventory team didn't actually take the waterblock off the motherboard because that would be a bit of a hassle for me to reinstall and they did oh they took the CPU out of it too guys I guess I'm gonna have to put the whole thing back on again oh oh they took it apart even more than it comes apart to start with it is gonna take me a bit all right so that's done let's go ahead and pop this bad boy in here and oh yeah this board is wider than standard ATX so I'm going to need to move my SSDs ah well that's some good double-sided tape I think I bet this Drive now let's try and put the board ease all right just need to plug in all the fans plug in our power and now we need to swap out our original CPU block for this one that cools the entire board and CPU and varan and all that now I have a crazy idea normally you would think well Linus the best way to do that is probably to drain the whole loop connect everything and then refill it but I think we can skip the draining step as long as we keep the part of the loop that we open at the highest point I'm gonna prop it up on my graphics card I'm just gonna crack this open I can't find my vice grips this is not really optimal but ah so everything that's under me is waterproof I think tubing fittings reservoir industrial PPC fans there let's go ahead and undo the other side now here's the risky part I need to keep these two level because if one goes too high the water will go down down down down down and splurt up the other side Oh hardly fun oh I think it's in now let's see if this one reaches I should just rename the channel to like low effort water cooling tips forget it I'm just gonna get a MacPro no I'm kidding that's not actually a better solution so these are 3200 megahertz c14 now if gigabytes not impressed with what I'm doing with their high-end gaming components I'm sure g.skill is on a whole other level here throw the GPU back in and then we're good to go this is really a very horrible mounting mechanism I'm not even gonna try and screw it in this time I don't know why I bothered okay so all that's left you guys to fire it up and see if it still works there's definitely water in there come on baby let's try giving it ye olde receipt and see most clear and see if that resolves it hey hey hold on no idea what happened but it's up whoa my house has been reset nice so theoretically all we have to do is press 5.1 gigahertz Oh see and it'll work now this will probably take a few minutes changing chipsets and check this shiz out my friends we are booted not bad now neither of our network controllers have drivers here so I'm gonna have to download those but then we should be sitting pretty pretty quick here all right so while I reboot for a driver installed we're just gonna top up the water here we did lose a little bit of water and our new block takes up a lot more of it so let's just do some precision pouring with the Linus check chips water bottle not a supported use case for the Lynas tech tips water bottle that's about as full as it was before I guess sick so the purpose of what we're doing here is to ensure that we're actually getting the 5.1 gigahertz that were advertised when the systems are idle is not necessarily gonna be running at that speed but let's go ahead I hit it with a heavy CPU load and see what happens hey not bad okay then we survived our Cinebench test so that means the last thing for us to do is try to enable XMP which will adjust our memory automatically to its faster speed and tighter timings I don't have a lot of hope for this it's a good time that's a good sign too now that we've got that dialed in let's make sure it's not completely unstable do a quick Cinebench extreme run eight threads at over five gigahertz said oh yeah and your server has RGB now so we seem to be stable we actually got 10 more points went from 568 to 578 so we're gonna go ahead and shutdown Cinebench here no I don't want to say that and Edie show me where our sample project is why don't we do the tech linked now Tech linked even though it doesn't take that long to render is the kind of project where the faster it goes the nicer it is because it's only about 10 minutes but because we right shoot and edit it all within the same day the faster it exports renders and uploads the faster everybody gets to go home so let's go ahead and process is it just this one right here so I'm gonna remove this from the queue and we're gonna find out what do you think I think it's gonna be faster hey crash did even the reset switch not work that's pretty crash let's turn XMP off and people wonder why I don't like XMP never works alright we've got one more trick up our sleeves I pulled two of the sticks I think 16 gigs of RAM should be plenty for our workload here and we're gonna see if it's a little more stable without all the memory slots loaded up yeah there it is good good good overclocked running at the right frequency all right let's try that sample project again now what's interesting is our CPU is actually only running it 4.8 gigahertz right now I wonder if XMP is kind of screwing us here all right guys we are really close to results time here so for tech linked our time to be is 9 minutes 48 seconds and it looks like we're gonna come in well under that let's have a look here come on baby you have got to be kidding me 9 minutes and 19 seconds maybe we really did meet those other two cores so here's the situation we only beat our score by about 30 seconds which is not the kind of improvement that we were looking for so there's a couple factors at play here one is that even though I don't think this is an AVX workload it's kind of behaving like one so our cpu turbos to 5.0 5 or 5.1 in Cinebench but only hits 4.8 here which looks like an AV x offset so we're not getting quite the clock speed we were expecting and - it appears that my recollection may have been incorrect or Adobe may have updated their encoder because our CPU is getting absolutely pinned to a hundred percent in many cases here it may be that we actually do need more cores so there's no way around it we need to reevaluate here this project has really challenged everything I thought I knew about our video export workload so what we're gonna have to do is take things entirely back to the drawing board and to do that I've set up a test bench here so it's much quicker for me to swap things in and out with Intel's 18 core 79 80 XE with the goal being to determine well G exactly how many course do we need for this how well does it scale so the idea here is once we know that we can then find the fastest chip with that mini course and try this whole thing again so based on what we're looking at here with loads anywhere from about the 75 to 85 percent range on this thing we can guess and this will be a far from perfect gas but we can guess but maybe something in the neighborhood of 14 course could be the right answer fortunately we have a very unique ace up our sleeve this courtesy of our friends over at Puget because the only way to get this chip is through Intel's like secret special auction is a core I 999 9 t x e it actually has fewer course than a 99 80 X C at only 14 verses 18 but it turbos to 5 gigahertz and it's base clock is 4 gigahertz so why don't we give it a shot shall we got nothing else to lose just time naturally changing out the CPU necessitates another motherboard swap so once again this poor Horace water-cooled board is getting pulled from a project not because it did a bad job but just because it wasn't the right fit after all this going back to the original block so stupid how bad is it it's definitely dripping a bit now something to be aware of guys is that while electronics and water definitely don't mix as long as they're not powered the likelihood of doing permanent damage is actually very low not very low it's lower oh yeah I'm pretty bad this time okay here we go and they're beautiful Oh where's that block yep it's on the floor so that goes to the inlet and that goes to the outlet gladden Kevin for the board I'm going with a prime X 299 deluxe not for any particular reason other than that that's what I found on the shelf all right so here we go even though it's 14 compared to 18 cores because of its much higher frequencies this is a 205 watt TDP CPU and that's assuming that's accounting for Intel's optimism with respect to their TDPS all right now we're ready blocks on cables are routed strap it in all right it's reassembled please work like just work it occurs to me this is a relatively new CPU and I have no idea when this board's BIOS was last updated heck yeah heck yeah all right it's good sign chuckling transcode mov and it doesn't look like it's going to be any faster at all curiously our CPU usage is significantly lower than it was on the 18 core okay and our time is looking like it's going to come in just over seven minutes for the raw and code which should put us right around the same time so we're at nine thirty eight which is ten seconds faster than our original configuration but actually 20 seconds slower than our water-cooled overclocks 9900 k but I think we can do a little better here it occurs to me that just because XMP didn't work on that other board doesn't mean it won't work on this one because it might have been optimized for quad channel operation so we're gonna go ahead and try again with XMP good luck everyone well this puppy's definitely haulin now we're seeing turbo speeds floating right around the 4 gigahertz range and that estimated time remaining looks like it might be as much as 30 45 seconds faster than our last run what remains to be seen is whether or not it's stable surprisingly was stable enough to finish the render all right good job XMP 850 wow so we actually crushed our original time that time goes to show you what more cores more clock speed and faster memory will do for you wow that's almost by a full minute so now that we've at least managed to make the Machine faster I think I'm gonna stop fooling around because this is two full days that the editors haven't had their transcode server but I'm also feeling pretty inspired right now because we did manage to get better results than this with that weird 1u gigabyte overclockable server that we checked out a little while ago so what I think is that with a better designed water cooling system maybe board with beefier VRMs or something along those lines that we could push this further I think our 500 watt power supply might actually be holding us back as well so we're gonna leave this one here for now but next time I'm gonna be coming back at you guys with a custom designed enclosure that's really gonna let this thing rip Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and more and their premium membership gives you unlimited access to high-quality classes on must know topics so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities in life and do the work that you love it's more affordable than most learning platforms out there with an annual subscription costing less than $10 a month and it's got tons of great stuff like you can check out Christopher Dodd who is a top teacher at Skillshare he's a self-taught web developer who inspires and educates students his classes go over the fundamentals of web development and he has over 6500 students signed up for his courses the first 500 of you to use the promo link in the description are gonna get your first two months for free so don't wait guys go check out Skillshare at the link below so thanks for watching 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