Well here's my take on this build. I found a deal on a
4048B-TR4FT with the MEM2 risers from
TheServerStore and loaded it with
E7-8890 v4s. There's 256GB of DDR4 (32x8GB), and I rehomed an Nvidia 3090 from another machine. Sadly, the GPU has an enormous backplate that won't quite fit, so it's going to live in an external enclosure thanks to a few PCIe extension cables - not pretty, but it does the job.
I wanted to keep it quiet, but I really didn't want to go with water cooling since I plan to run it remotely frequently. Dynatron make the
R27, which just barely fits in this machine. After a bit of cajoling the final fit of those towers is satisfying! All of the stock fans are swapped with Noctuas and I replaced the stock PSUs with
PWS-1K28P-SQs. They are indeed silent - thanks
@nickblack! The entire machine is dead quiet, and I was able to -j96 build without overheating.
I'll post a bit more once I get to the OS and other tuning. At present, here are some questions I have about the setup:
- I tried configuring two SSDs in RAID0 in the BIOS, but I'm only getting 500MBps when I was expecting them to double up for 1GBps. Am I doing something silly?
- At idle and low load the CPUs run at 3.4GHz as expected, but under full load, they were cut back to 2.8GHz. The temps were only 70C, so I don't think it's thermal throttling. Is the lower core speed expected? Can I override it?
- PWS-1K28P-SQs which each put out 1000W. I have them plugged into smart outlets, and they are each drawing about 500W under load for a total of 1000W that settles down to about 800W on a longer build. That shows the PSUs are balancing the power draw which is great, but I was expecting it to consume even more. The PSUs and cores seem to be capable of more. Any ideas?
Thanks to everyone in this thread for all the tips! I was hunting for a quad socket LG2011 MB, and I had seen a few of these boards on ebay. This thread helped me make the call.