Gadgetory

so you might have noticed it's been a while since I've talked about the Oh the hundred thousand dollar PC and I'm approximating the cost because I actually don't know exactly how much it's going to end up coming to yet because there's still a few things that are to be determined about the final configuration but there's a good reason for all of that I've been waiting on some really important hardware to continue my testing so right now we've got a problem with the current configuration this motherboard can accept a measly seven PCI Express 16x devices I mean what kind of chump nonsense is that for a hundred thousand dollar computer that I aim to have six video editors editing 8k footage off of at the same time so I got in touch with actually a couple of really special companies one of them is Thermaltake who sent over a bunch of their PCI Express extenders I'm gonna use these but to test running a bunch of graphics cards off of this thing without water blocking them all up beforehand which is what I did last time which was super stupid because then when I had issues it was a nightmare and this this is actually a bunch of boxes from that company called one-stop systems who if you're not in the enterprise space you've probably never heard of but if you are even then you might not have heard of them and they make PCI Express extension solutions allowing you to take a single slot and adapt it to in this case eight slots how does that work oh we're gonna find out not cheaply though thanks to video blocks for sponsoring this video they're a great subscription-based resource for downloading stock footage video and more check out the link below to learn more so the funny thing about these guys was when I got in touch with them the bloke that I spoke with was actually a fan of the town he was like super into working with us and he was like yeah let me let me carry this up the chain and then I I spoke with his manager and she wasn't as familiar personally but then her husband was apparently super into Linus tech tips and she was like okay yeah no you know this sounds this sounds great we'd love to work with you and then I followed up and they basically said yeah everything's shipped but I hadn't actually worked out what I needed or really talked to them about it much yet so I'm not a hundred percent sure what's here yet so we're gonna find out together I did know this board was coming so they've actually got a bunch of different PCI Express expansion products even you can get like chassis that allow you to plug something from the back of one computer into the back of another one that looks like a computer but it's actually just a box full of PCI Express expansion or you can get a bare-bones board which it would appear is what they've sent to me but I'm not a hundred percent sure how or if any of it is going to work so this guy right here is their Hib 35 X 4 this is a PCI Express X 4 to cable adapter so this is going to go into our system and is going to adapt a PCI Express slot to a table that we can plug into the back of the system this is PCI Express over a cable I'm not talking like you know Thunderbolt I'm talking pure full capability PCI Express be stopped right look at this connector Oh feels good we're turning the one PCI Express slot on the other end here into eight more eight more PCI Express slots 5/8 pin power connectors and a 24 pin what are they expecting you to plug into this thing honestly what they're doing is not that unusual in fact your motherboard you watching right now your motherboard probably has similar technology because you're probably aware already if you've followed our CPU reviews that especially mainstream CPUs don't have a ton of PCI Express Lanes on them so then how exactly is it that you end up with you know for 16 X slots and a bunch of PCIe 4x slots when your CPU only has like 20 to 24 lanes well the way that they do that is using what's called a PL X chips so these are effectively think of them as kind of like a network switch where you take one Ethernet connection and you split it out to eight computers for PCI Express so this is going to be a very high-end PCI Express switcher chip and then you're gonna find those same kinds of adapters on here so that allows all of this traffic to share this one interface now to be clear you're not going to be able to connect 8 16x graphics cards and get the full performance out of all on that exactly at the same time but I'm planning to use it for USB 3 something where with 6 editors not everyone's going to be slamming it at exactly the same moment so it should work fine knock on wood till until your knuckles are raw right there was another piece of hardware that I needed to continue my testing so we only have a couple of octane PCI Express SSDs in the building so what I wanted was to swap out my 750 s for these and have a look at what VM performance looks like running on octane RAID one the other thing I was waiting for cable mods sent over some PCI Express power connectors that I'm gonna need to extend the cables for these graphics cards that I'm going to be running on extensions I just found the most perfect spot for it you guys never would have believed that I didn't know exactly what I was doing here so I've got the the host adapter installed on the other side I throw in a second power supply here and then check this out oh that could work ma'am you have to like pull this panel off and maybe like laser cut them or something but we could have all our USB ports right on the back of the system like that anyway for today though this is just this is just a dry dry run I'm gonna bring it around the other side so with this expansion daughterboard we're gonna have a total of six remaining because I'm going to take up one of the PCIe slots with the host card plus eight so that is 14 PCI Express slots plus all the ones that I am adapting from the U dot two plugs on the motherboard so 18 PCI Express slots just the right number creep 100 okay our PCIe power let's hook up some graphics cards here Sally we're just gonna do 4 graphics cards for today so some of the editors are gonna get full 16x slots for their graphics cards and others are gonna be stuck with a little bit less but for the purposes of what we're doing that's not gonna affect performance in any meaningful way so we're just gonna pick some random slots here it's tell some GPUs baby so those will go there sure so that'll go there sure yeah I mean there does that work that kind of reasonable we never claimed this video wasn't gonna be madness you knew what you were clicking on okay leaning tower of titans at right yeah what could go wrong oh okay that's one I mean should we do a quick test to make sure this even works before we go any further yeah okay all right let's do it is this on what the heck oh it turned off let's give it one more try because if there's one slot that doesn't like a graphics card or something like that being in it that's going to be a big problem because I need to fill all of them with graphics cards Yee you know what I think it might be is our one stop systems expansion card because I don't have the power supply plugged into the target end of it yet so it might not like something about what's going on here so let's try it with just the graphics card so we're not changing too many variables at once here there it is okay all right so while this is booting up we need to go get ourselves another power supply and it can't be like some wussy power supply it's got to have I gotta find out what kind of connectors these are these PCI Express are they oh oh crap they're not PCIe it's gonna be getting so this is interesting of our five ax 1500 eyes I apparently have three of them and then we also have a 1600 I that Jake apparently has checked out long term what is he what does he need a 1600 on his test bench for okay let's go let's go get one of the three ax eyes that jake has so I have one on my bench yeah so I have one in my you know I have one in my rig at home I have one in the desk PC you're stupid why do you have so much crap here can you clean this up I mean it's working out for me right now but in general okay what did he do can you believe what Jake did to this power supply you see this is why this is why I rage out at people for like the way that they treat the hardware around here sometimes you say this like you've never seen it before literally the only person who's ever used it and naturally the EPS connectors aren't even in here thanks Jake should I just fire him let me know in the comments new plan Jake did find another 1500 I so we're just going to use that this is the beauty of modular power supply is like how else would you have ended up being able to Frankenstein a regular desktop power supply to power this weird board all we got to do is this well I mean it makes it look like there's something wrong with it why did you put so much tape on it now I have no idea what triggers this thing to turn on here we go alright that's all looking peachy editor don't include that these guys were very gracious to send us this stuff and I don't want them to see that the bloke that I spoke with was actually a fan of the channel now I do want to know if it's working so here why don't we grab our obtained drives and throw those on there see that happens obviously there's something like a high-speed storage device we're not expecting to get our full performance out of it in this kind of a situation - but I just want to know if it's working at all this is terrifying everything about this is wrong let's take a picture for Instagram there they are there's the opt-in SSDs just like that basically plug and play you just have to make sure you actually plug all the things it may not look like much but she's got it where it counts kid right gorgeous so our opt-in drives are being picked up by the OS and via me zero and one and this is what I really need to know this is gonna tell me if this whole thing is gonna work or not because if I can't pass through the controllers individually then there's I'm not gonna be able to get everything hot probably look at all of these plx bridges here that is madness so the update is mostly bad news there is what's called an ACS override patch that you can enable to try to break individual items that are in a single Iowa MMU group out into their own iommu groups but as far as I'm read knows the the code for the patch has been broken since Intel skylake and it doesn't seem to be working here obviously this is much newer than skylake but they have suggested that if we shut this baby down pull the card out and put it in a Haswell or older system and see if that works that maybe they could try fixing the patch to work on skylake and then it might work in this system so that's our that's our first step here well I'm not running this for very long so we're just gonna put that there yeah okay yeah that seems pretty stable all right so this is where we find out if the hack will potentially work with our PCI Express splitter device one thing that's nice is how plug-and-play this thing's been these SSDs are both showing up perfectly just plugged into a consumer board so that's pretty cool and honestly we should still get some use out of it even if it just means that all of our USB cards that we have plugged into it can't be passed through the VMS it'll still be nice to have all of those ports ok so I can't reach my contact on rates so what I'm gonna do then is just throw some USB cards in here and see if we can pass one through to something everything continues to get more ghetto now we have SSDs hanging off here aren't they beautiful our NSS USB controller is showing up here that's one of the ones that's plugged into the daughter board but we still don't know if the override worked so let's go ahead and let this populate remember this doesn't tell us if we can get it working this tells us if maybe we could get it working this looks like a very big group so this is all the PL x tono all the same dammit okay it's not all bad we still get the benefits of using a PCI Express switch for all our USB devices so everything that we do hook up will be better managed and the whole thing does work really seamlessly I had just really hoped for hot plug and it looks like that might be out of my grasp however cool this hardware might be have you ever needed a beautiful shot of like mountains or wild animals or even something like an astronaut in space for your video but you didn't have the time or budget to get it yourself well videoblocks has you covered with unlimited downloads through their member library that contains over a hundred and fifteen thousand HD and 4k clips along with After Effects templates motion backgrounds and more an additional marketplace for other footage is also available so if you're a member you say 40% and you get to support the artists because videoblocks doesn't take a single cent all the footage on video blocks is royalty-free which means you can keep and use the clip as many times as you want forever and new footage gets added regularly so you'll always have fresh new content to check out and use get all of this with an unlimited member planet video blocks today at the link below so thanks for watching guys hopefully you enjoyed coming along for what would normally be like a behind-the-scenes type of troubleshooting for a project like this if you guys disliked this video you could hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description as long as you don't plan to use PCI pass-through for the individual things you have plugged into it for each one of your VMs oh I just had a new thought wait what if every single slot thought its own daughter board with the GPU and the usb on bat okay that's probably a project for another day let's just get the video editing working that's one system anyway subscribe and check out our merch and we have that linked below and also our forum you should join that