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If JJ Abrams did a Terrestrial action film in the same vein of his Star Trek and Star Wars films it would go something like this: Residents of the West Coast of America witness terrorists blowing up the Eiffel Tower, so they hop in their car and drive to Moscow, arriving in under 5 minutes.

I saw a quote from a media representative that they actually did consider not watching the commercials to be stealing. At the time, they just couldn't do anything about it. Found it:

I have a pair of 950s running media duty for the 4k tvs over my workstation, which is probably a waste. I was using a pair of g3258 anniversary edition pentiums @4gz, but I discovered something. Youtube will drop frames on anything less than 4 cores - I get better youtube playback on a Q6600 at...

Cute cluster.

These motherboards are pulls from a Cray cluster computer, afaik, powering pairs of boards at a time. Sourcing such things where I live is costly, to say the least. Not to mention the weird formfactor. I'm much happier adapting an ATX supply than trying that.

I hope that's all it is. I really want those ATX adapters - it's another $50 in parts and about 4 days work to make my own :( It took 4 months for me to receive a package of switches, with no obvious extra customs investigation indicated.

So, a small update. I'm having problems with overseas shipments - anything from China is taking up to 2 months or so extra to arrive, for unknown reasons. That means I'm currently still short of fans, and, crucially, the ATX->Supermicro power adapters. The only thing new that I have received are...

I haven't used the X8DTL machine much, except as a stand-in desktop for the couple of months it took to actually build the bigger machine. When I get some of my other projects going, it will be a linux box so I can do my dev work. I disabled the built in VGA on both boards in the windows...

I think a VP was ultimately fired, but it hasn't changed the corporate culture. It's actually worse now. Some tools are IE only, some are Chrome only, and others will stop working in one or the other after a rollout.

Those are the silver 45's. They go in shiny side down, apparently.

The company I work for managed to switch to windows 7 a couple of years back. We have a custom virtual machine app that does one thing - runs IE 6 to support our highly customized Siebel installation. They're now installing Chrome on the machines, with an auto-redirector from ie8 for some...

Wow. I've been using one of these Nighthawks for my access point for years, but I haven't been updating the firmware - I left it on whatever it came with. Turns out I should pay more attention to it. Thankfully I just turned it down in favour of a couple of Linksys EA6500's meshed together using...

I picked up an 80186 out of an early graphics design/cad terminal (An intergraph?) It was pretty cool for the age - 20+ inch built in monitor and a ton of individual expansion boards.

I can't say I was impressed but, sadly, that was not the worst-shipped ram I've received in the last couple of months. I had ordered some ECC ram for my file server - 3 sticks - and they shipped it in a padded envelope, inside of which each stick was in a to-size static bag. This was shipped...

So, more money spent. Brought in an additional 96gb of ram, so 192gb total for the cluster - 48gb/node and 24gb/cpu. Once again, an eBay purchase gone right, despite arriving in this scary looking bag:

They won't, not can't. Even if they weren't selling it, and they probably are, your data is still valuable to them. There's almost no point to these devices for the company otherwise.

Once I'd gotten the warmup out of the way, I tried to tackle the next bit of the cluster project - the Connection Machine-style LED display. This is an array of red LEDs indicating CPU load on the front of machines from Thinking Machines CM-1 and CM-5 supercomputers. I had originally planned...

So, some progress of a different sort. I tried to set up the bending brake, but I need some bolts and C-clamps to make a go of that, so I put that aside and took a stab at the embedded half of the project - the Blinkenlight array. The theory is to take some cheap 8x8 LED arrays and run them off...

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say its a "Linnmon / Alex Dark Table, black-brown, gray", Ikea part number 290.472.57 At least in Canada, anyway. The drawers are a little different - maybe an older model? The US Ikea site shows the same version as the Canadian model with 5 drawers instead of 4...

I'm doing 8 x5650s :) It's a toy cluster so it won't just be blender. Good to know that the memory isn't a big deal.

I was fooled by the Ram layout on that board, which is a bit backwards from what I expected. You don't hit over 10gb usage? Is that for Blender? I'm building a small x5650 based rendering farm, and I've specced 12gb/cpu for now, but I don't know what the actual ram usage would be yet.

They can't quote prices without knowing the dimensions of the metal - the computer calculates everything. Someone said it's all done by weight, which would make the per unit price on the invoice the fault of a lazy programmer. Good catch. I could make it taller, or I may end up making the unit...

This Silverstone Fortress series? http://www.silverstonetek.com/product_case.php?tno=7&area=en There's 7 different Fortress cases listed, and 4 of them take ATX or larger boards. (FT01, FT02, FT04, FT05)

So, I've been trying to design the case/shroud for the individual motherboards, and I was mostly thinking about building a framework out of aluminum bars and angles, then bolting aluminum sheet to that. Sort of like an endo-skeleton. There were issues with this approach - having to countersink...

The Air 540 is a good looking case, and the airflow on the motherboard side is superb - I didn't have to do anything special to cool the northbridge on this build like I did with the Antec case. However, I found the fit and finish a little rough, the 3.5HD options limited, and the materials were...

He said it was for CPU rendering, so more cores will trump clock speed. That being said, I think having ram for only one CPU is also going to harm performance. Any time the 2nd cpu has to do anything it has to negotiate across the bus to borrow ram from the first. Unless that's changed on the...

AFAICT, a big part of being unable to fly something remotely is "Which way was it going again", "Your left or my left", and "Is it upside down? I can't tell from here". All of that's mitigated when you add the meat sack to the machine. OTOH, I am in tech support, so I also don't trust the...

I find sketchup's controls clunky, and the auto snap seems to be erratic at best. Thankfully, the heatsinks I have are fairly light. All the weight in them that's there is in the base plate, directly on the socket, so there isn't any additional torque on the board. I'm far more comfortable...

Thankfully, no. Though I just found out that the 4-bay hot swap bay I want will be over $100 too... Now that I know that my thermal solution should more or less work, the next step is actually design the case. I'm a huge fan of blinkenlights, and the supercomputer in Jurassic Park made a big...

That's a lot of *very* sweet hardware. You'll have to excuse me... I need a moment. In private...

Thanks :) There was a fair bit of clenching involved when I hit the power for the first time. It didn't help that apparently this board plays dead on a cold start - no heartbeat or power good LED lights, which are otherwise almost always on. I said that designing the case was the next thing to...

The first problem to solve is the fact that these motherboards have non-standard 20 pin power connections. They only take 12v and 5v standby, with the rest of the voltages generated on board. I have adapters ordered from ebay, but they're going to take a month to get here. As I've sourced all...

Another vote for Lian-Li here, though I'd love a Caselabs if I had the cash. I've had several Lian-li - three of the big (2ft x 2ft x 8in) full tower cases from back in the day, but those fall down a bit on cooling these days with 2x80mm fan mounts instead of 120mm or 140mm mounts. One of my...

Thanks! There are 2 of them - one down the side and one across the back. They're made from 98" SALJAN countertops, an Alex drawer unit, a bunch of $5 ADILS legs, and 2x4 to height match with the existing desk. http://www.ikea.com/ca/en/catalog/products/60335694/#/60335694...

My freshly re-vamped workstation. The desk has 3 LG 4k monitors, powered by the cube on the left. The smaller monitor on the right is for status information. It's not a gaming rig - only a GTX 1060, but it has dual X5680 processsors for 12c/24t at 3.33ghz, and 48gb ram. The TV runs off an...

Now that my dual-cpu cube computer is built, I'm free to move on to a new project. Introducing TM-β: Those are Xeon X5650s - 2.66ghz, 6 core/12 thread, Socket 1366 The heatsinks. Supermicro 2U passive, with heatpipes. I was going to go with something bigger, but the boards are... a...

I'm not actually using this one for gaming. The GTX 1060 is there specifically because I wanted something to drive 3 x 4k displays for general workstation work and light 3d (some 3d modelling). I originally had 2 x RX 470 4gb cards, but the X8DT3 only has one 16x slot. My gaming rig is in the...

I've long been a huge fan of dual-CPU machines, all the way back to the days of running oc'd Celeron 366's at 550 on an Abit BP-6. In fact, I have a relevant classic gaming machine I put together a while back: That's a Tyan K7D Master-L with two Athlon 2100+, cooled by Alpha Pal 6035...

It's funny. The first board I picked up was an X8DAi, which would make a great desktop board except for it's size - 2 x16 slots and built in sound. The southbridge worried me because it had active cooling, and the fan seemed a bit duff on my board, so it wasn't going to be easy to fix and not...

thanks :) Here's a preview of my upcoming labour of Duallie/cube case love