My little project - Ikea style

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Hey guys,

So i've been running BOINC for a couple of months now and I've decided to build something that a. I can leave on 24/7 and b. is good value for money and scalable

The purpose of the project is not about maximum computing performance. While I like the idea of using GPU's for crunching they are very noisey and draw a lot of power, I don't want to go down the watercooling route because its not something that interests me. I want to be able to contribute but in a way that suits me which means cheap and quiet...ish so I give you the case:

The Ikea Helmer

bf899ab8.jpg


For me it was the obvious choice, it was £25 and can hold six computers, I don't think you can get better value for money in that respect.

Motherboard wise i've gone for the Asus P8H61-MX it's main pro is that it fits nicely inside the helmers drawers and its got onboard VGA for initial config. I've initially bought 3 at £26 each refurbished, as I don't need any of the gubbins that come with the retail board I figured this was a good way to save money.

RAM wise i've gone for one 4 gig stick in each board, managed to get some off ebay for £11 each which I thought was a steal and I am able to expand in the future.

PSU's are from an OcUK competitor at £13 each, 400w should be enough as there will be no HDD or optical drives in the setups. I figured that 400w should leave plenty of headroom as they are cheap I didnt want to stress them too much.

The reason I have only bought 3 of everything as I already have 2 matx bundles sat doing nothing, an E6600 clocked at 3.4ghz and a Q6600 running at 3.4Ghz. The last drawer I thought I would leave spare for the time being.

I won't go into too much detail on the logistics of the build as it has been covered a few times online here: https://sites.google.com/site/woojay/helmer

and here:

http://helmer.sfe.se/

I will either be going down the DRBL route or booting from micro usb sticks but either way there will be no hard drives. They'll be running linux which is good as I am most comfortable with it.

The only question I have really is what CPU's to go with? Looking at a few cpu tables the G620 looks like a cheap start but I thinking that performance is going to be pretty shoddy? The other option I had considered was the i3 2120, the main plus with this is the hyperthreading, just wondered what people thought?

All the parts are in the post, I have the case so you will see a few updates from me this week. I am currently at home recovering from an operation so it gives me time to build the beast.

Thanks for reading
B
 
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That's a great idea you have there! I would go for the celeron G540's on this week only as they are only a little bit slower than the G620's you mentioned but are significantly cheaper. You can get almost 3 of them for the price of a single core i3 so it definitely offers good value for money, although at the expense of power consumption/performance ratio which is fairly important if you are running them 24/7. Although at the rate that prices drop on technology you'd probably be able to get cheap i3/i5's whenever they go EOL.
 
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OP
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East Midlands
So the motherboards, PSU's and RAM have arrived, managed to get an i3 2100 from ebay for £55 which should be here on monday, got an asrock G31 for the Q6600 off the MM as I've just realised my 945G-DVI is too wide so im just about ready to start.

Going to commence the build on Monday round a friends house, the helmer is already there and he has a lot more tools / gubbins than me so its more convenient. We have 3 legs and 2 left hands between us so it'll be interesting to see how we get on :)

@synixx - going to put an ad in the wanted section to see if I can get two more i3's having HT should net me an extra 30% performance crunching and as the machine will hopefully be used for rendering in the future I think it would be worth spending the extra few pennies.

Pics to follow
 
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OP
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Ok so here is how far we got this morning, wasn't that easy having left hands but we've done as much as we can for the time being, unfortunately the stock HSF's for the 1155 chips didn't arrive in the post this morning so we could only get one node up and running.

Current setup - 3 i3 boards plus the E6600 at the bottom:

23c8a338.jpg


One of the i3 boards:

5fa4ebfd.jpg


The completed E6600 drawer:

95ad5d3c.jpg


Its all very rough at the moment as we just wanted to get everything sized up, haven't figured out what to do with the cables yet but my friend said he would be able to make them off once his arm is better. The fronts of the drawers I will be cutting up so that the PSU and an 80mm fan can be screwed to the front, the space next to the PSU is exactly the right size.

Thats it for now until the HSF's show up, any comments suggestions welcome :)

Thanks
B
 
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OP
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Nice, what are you planning on doing about airflow?

When I have use of both hands again i'll be reversing the setup and removing the rear panel so that the back of the drawers are exposed then i'll mill a hole for an 80mm fan in each draw back.

On the front i'll dremel out the label holder on the front of the draw and leave it open or stick a 40mm fan in there.

I want it to look like a chest of drawers as much as possible, the construction of the unit is completely tooless so when the time comes I can just switch things round.
 
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Maybe 120 at the back would be quieter, and perhaps another 120 on the side hidden from view. Otherwise it might be a bit noisy sucking air through that little hole. Could test in cardboard model maybe.
 
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