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jpmomo

Active Member
Aug 12, 2018
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My never ending journey to build a compact server with as much compute power as I can fit! The other mandate is it couldn't be just another "beige box"

The beginning: Why not make it round?
Based on a supermicro xeon-D second gen motherboard 2146nt 8c cpu with a lot of onboard ethernet ports (another requirement as these servers are used for a special traffic generating server.) complete carbon fiber with magnets for easy access.

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a bit more work than using flat carbon panels!

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8 cores are nice but 20 is better!


asrockrack epc612d4i mini-itx with a 20c xeon e5-2698v4
watercooled and case hand built from scratch:

beginning cad work:

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testing power options in isolation:

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finished product:

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20 cores are pretty nice but why not try the new (at the time) 28c xeon platinum 8176!

early cad work:

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Used HOK (house of kolor) cobalt blue with matching blue carbon weave top plate:

internal pic using another asrockrack mini-itx!

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and why not add a bit of zebra wood just because.....!

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and why not throw a dual 100GE nic in while I'm at it!

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of course all that is well and good but then some folks kept wondering if it was possible to fit the new amd epyc rome 7h12 64c cpu into a sff(small form factor case)!

and so the journey began. There weren't many mb even out that supported the new (at the time) rome series of cpus. However, I had a contact at supermicro that was able to get me an odd proprietary mb that was pretty small. I had Josh Sniffen (custom case builder) go to work on some cad designs. He was able to come up with a way to fit the 64c beast into a sff custom case!

early cad work:

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early component design work:


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finally pcie gen 4 so we could utilize the mellanox connectx-6 dual 100GE nic!


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another perspective shot:

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even has a built-in handle!

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I also started to work with some of the intel ice lake cpus now that they support pci gen4 and have a few custom servers using them. But will have to wait on the next gen amd or intel to kick it up another notch from the latest raptor ultra!

Thanks for viewing!
 

jpmomo

Active Member
Aug 12, 2018
531
192
43
Nice work!!

You need to get your hands on an ASRock Rack > ROMED4ID-2T and you can shrink the Rom build down to deep-itx size - 6.7"x 8.2" :D
the rome build started a few years before the romed4 was available. the specific mb we used was the h12-ssw-in. I did consider romed4 mb for a new build but due to it not being exactly a mini-itx, we would have to use a custom frame. We needed to keep the mb for this new build to mini-itx and the romed4 wouldn't work.
 
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