APOLLO (2CPU LGA1366 Server | InWin PP689) - by alpenwasser

[alpenwasser]

Noctua for the WIN!!!

Haha, yeah those coolers are pretty neat. Build quality is superb. Although I most likely
won't actually be using any Noctua fans, but the San Ace ones instead.

bloody hell alpenwasser, is there ever a point where you doing have a build on the go haha

Haha, yeah once I'm done with this and HELIOS I'll be done for quite a while I reckon.
No monies left after that. :lol:

If it purpose is to be a server and you are not going to put a window panel on it I don't think there is much reason to paint/powder coat the inside. As much as it would be nice to see and make a good build log, it just is not necessary.

That's what I've been thinking TBH. It would be totally awesome to make this all pretty
and such, but as things are now I can neither justify the costs to my dad (who would be
paying for it) nor do I have the time, with time being the bigger problem (I might be able
to get the cash to pay for powder coating myself). But hey, maybe at a later date?

Despite that, there will definitely be custom cables. If I can't have pretty colours I at
least want things to be anally tidy and neat.

Definately good prices on the hardware, curious how well it performs. I have plans for a home server/test bench with virtualisation so could do with something with a little bit of guts about it.

I'm pretty happy with the costs so far, yes (especially the CPUs). Had a few stability
issues, been running mprime (the Linux version of Prime95) for the past few days, will
make a post about that once I'm confident I've resolved any possible stability problems
and when I get the time to write it up.

If you want to go virtualization, you might be interested in some hexacores instead of
quadcore CPUs (though I'm not an expert on virt, so I might be off on that one). The
L5639 is currently going for about 100 USD a pop on eBay. But for this rig that wasn't
really necessary (even eight cores is probably overkill for a file server, although I will
be using ZFS' on-the-fly compression feature, which should make good use of that
CPU power at least some of the time).


Cheers,
-aw

 

[JayCobs]

Haha, yeah those coolers are pretty neat. Build quality is superb. Although I most likely
won't actually be using any Noctua fans, but the San Ace ones instead.

For a fleeting moment I thought you were joining the club! :lol:

 

[alpenwasser]

For a fleeting moment I thought you were joining the club! :lol:

Well, I'll still have Noctua coolers, so...

Seriously though, I love those San Ace fans for this build. They're way too loud for something
like HELIOS, which will end up in my room, but for something that's in its own separate
room they're perfect. And as a build quality fetishist, handling those rather hefty double
ball bearing fans is a pure joy. :wub:

I'd love to have some double ball bearing 140's for HELIOS, but they're around 50 to 70 USD
per piece, and they'll never be as silent as the Spectre Pros, so I don't really see the point
in spending 400 to 600 USD on them. But hell, those would be awesome (they weight
450 grams a piece, which is about one pound, massive construction FTW! ).

Hell, I'd even take some industrial sleeve bearing fans from Papst (also extremely well
built), but they don't come in 140.

Bottom line: I'd love to have industrial grade build quality coupled with extremely low
noise, but that's just not going to happen as fas as I'm able to tell.

 

[JayCobs]

Bottom line: I'd love to have industrial grade build quality coupled with extremely low
noise, but that's just not going to happen as fas as I'm able to tell.

Industrial grade will NEVER be quiet.

 

[Gk1ngs]

The word industrial almost means noise lol

 

[alpenwasser]

Industrial grade will NEVER be quiet.

The word industrial almost means noise lol

Yup, that's been my conclusion so far. Although, the 120 San Aces I ordered are actually
fairly quiet, just not as quiet as the Spectre Pros. They're definitely not loud, just not uber-
silent. But for a machine I'll have in my room (e.g. HELIOS) I'm not looking for quiet-ish, I
want near absolute noiselessness, and that's just not in the cards.

 

[Gk1ngs]

So any more progress been made with this? I'm pretty curious about this one. Hopefully I will be able to get some funds up after the new year and get some gear together for a dual Xeon build.

How are you finding the motherboard as it seems to be one of the more popular so will prob go with the same or similar from Supermicro.

 

[alpenwasser]

So any more progress been made with this? I'm pretty curious about this one. Hopefully I will be able to get some funds up after the new year and get some gear together for a dual Xeon build.

How are you finding the motherboard as it seems to be one of the more popular so will prob go with the same or similar from Supermicro.

Been busy with college in the past few weeks, so I'll hopefully continue with this after the
festivities. I ran into a few stability problems (solved now).

Since the board is made for server chassis it relies on massive airflow to keep things cool
(specifically, the chipset), which was not fulfilled in my case. So once I started running
mprime (the Linux variant of Prime95) it would crash the machine rather quickly and it would
refuse to boot up again for 15 to 30 minutes. The chipset heatsink got so hot during this
that you could not actually touch it without burning your fingers. The CPUs run at around
40 C during mprime.

I have now improvised a fan onto the chipset heatsink and the board has gotten a few
dozen hours of mprime under its belt without problems, so I think it's OK now (stays at
around 65 to 68 C, threshold is 95 C).

Other than that the board seems to be pretty good (IPMI: awesome!). Just keep in mind
that if you want to run HDD's > 2 TB on it, you'll need a PCI-E adapter since those disks
won't get properly recognized by the board as there weren't any out when the board was
brought to market.

 

[Gk1ngs]

Thanks for the heads up on the over heating issue. I will probibly end up with the same issue then.
Look foreward to seeing updates and the improvised fan when you have more free time, but for now good luck with the studies.

 

[Gk1ngs]

Hope the studies are going well. I just had a quick question about where you got your M/B from was this another eBay purchase? I had a quick look n mostly seem to be finding ones coming from America, n being in the UK don't really want to pay such high shipping and import tax if it can be helped.

 

[alpenwasser]

Hope the studies are going well. I just had a quick question about where you got your M/B from was this another eBay purchase? I had a quick look n mostly seem to be finding ones coming from America, n being in the UK don't really want to pay such high shipping and import tax if it can be helped.

Things are going well, thanks for asking.

Yes, I bought the board on eBay, specifically from this offer: link

I haven't been able to find anything from Europe sadly, but since I order quite a lot of stuff
on eBay I have by now gotten used to high shipping costs and import taxes.

Since I'm here anyway: There will be progress on this shortly, I have just a few more
items waiting to arrive and then I can finish this one.

 

[Gk1ngs]

I haven't been able to find anything from Europe sadly, but since I order quite a lot of stuff
on eBay I have by now gotten used to high shipping costs and import taxes

I couldn't seem to get the M/B in europe, found some processors but could get better for less from the US, is really odd the way that works. But have started ordering parts n should be getting a build log started shortly.

Since I'm here anyway: There will be progress on this shortly, I have just a few more
items waiting to arrive and then I can finish this one.

Really looking forward to seeing these updates and how its coming along.

 

[alpenwasser]

PSU Mounting & LSI Controller Testing

Mounting the PSU, Testing LSI Controller


Finally, UPDATE TIME!

Yeah, it's taking a lot longer to finish this than I'd initially hoped (doesn't
it always with these sort of projects...). But I've been working on it in the last
few weeks and now finally have something to share.



PSU Fitting Issue

The PSU slides into this case through an opening from behind, and since the case
isn't really made for normal ATX-sized PSUs (but server PSUs instead, it's a
rather tight fit. To be more specific: The PSU in its stock config does not fit,
the screws for the fan grill and the fan grill itself bump up against the
case. An easy fix though, just needed to remove the fan grill on the PSU.

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And voilà:

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Furthermore, since normal server PSUs usually blow air through along their
longitudinal axis, there is no ventilation hole on the case for a fan on the top
of the PSU, which most of today's PSUs have. Not to worry, I still had an old
Aquacomputer rad grill laying around. A bit of dremeling should be able to fix
this problem. Marking for cutting:

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And with the grill mounted:
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Bracket Collision

Another issue with mounting a PSU in the case that wasn't intended to be mounted
in this case: The bracket for the PSU does not quite line up correctly with the
power inlet.
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The power plug can still be connected, but the PSU sits crooked in the case and
it's a huge pain to mount like this.

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Again, a little bit of cutting was required:

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To give you an idea of how the PSU fits into the case:
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Needed to hook up some HDDs to test the LSI controller. Looks very ghetto, worked
like a charm.

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Next Up...

Manufacturing the drive cages, the so-called pièce de resistance...


So long
-aw

 

[SeekaX]

finally an update, you have been abstinent for a while.
the fan grill looks very nice, but i am not too sure about the PSU bracket. it looks a bit ghetto.
does this mean helios will finally have an update again? it's a shame that the build will probably be outdated before it is finished, it would drive me mad to have a Titan lying around for over a year.

 

[mehere]

now thats a tight fit
look right though
just one comment can you change the yellow tape to red to match the sata cables

 

[alpenwasser]

finally an update, you have been abstinent for a while.
the fan grill looks very nice, but i am not too sure about the PSU bracket. it looks a bit ghetto.
does this mean helios will finally have an update again? it's a shame that the build will probably be outdated before it is finished, it would drive me mad to have a Titan lying around for over a year.

Yeah, the PSU bracket comes stock with the case, and due to geometric
restrictions there isn't really much I can do to change it. It gets the job
done at least, that's my primary concern with anything that goes into this
rig.

HELIOS will still have to wait a bit, I needed to invest more money into this
rig than I originally planned (as is usual I suppose ), which means it'll
take me even longer to save up for the final stages of HELIOS.

It is however up and running in a temporary ghetto-setup at the moment
so that I can at least make use of its components.

PS: Yes, there's definitely enough radiator power in there, currently running
the two CPUs and the GPU on one 560, easy-peasy.

now thats a tight fit
look right though
just one comment can you change the yellow tape to red to match the sata cables

Hm, I don't think I have red tape lying around.

 

[alpenwasser]

The Disk Racks

The Disk Racks


A.k.a. the main part of this undertaking.


As mentioned elsewhere, one of the two main problem of our current server is
that it only has seven HDD slots, and they're already all filled up. The only
way to get more storage is to install larger disks, which isn't really all that
optimal.

One of the main points of this build was to have more disk slots. The PP689 only
offers four in its stock form, which you can upgrade to a maximum of thirteen
drives. You would need to buy another four-disk enclosure (which btw. I could
not find anywhere to buy), and a five-disk enclosure for the 5.25" bays. Since
13 drives aren't really that many, and since these enclosures aren't exactly
cheap, I decided to go another route.

It took me a while to figure out how to do it, but in the end this is what I
came up with. I had very generous help from one of my neighbours, who has a mill
and a lathe at his disposal, as well as plenty of time (he's a pensioneer ).


So off we went:


The Mill


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First Steps

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The Mill can also serve as a drill press. The drill chuck he looks ridiculously
huge when you put a small drill bit into it (he said they didn't have the
smaller model in stock when he needed to buy his, so he went with the large
one).

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Stumbled upon this when going through my pics. My dog's girlfriend, basically
(she's a labrador and belongs to another one of our neighbours). I was
dogsitting here for an evening a few weeks back. She can be a bit hyperactive at
times, but is a very lovely dog.

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Drilling and Milling

Lots of holes needed to be drilled for the pop rivets that were going to hold it
all together.

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Milling out the slots for the screwheads:

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Phase I Complete

The side panels of the disk racks completed. Testing with some broken old HDDs
I had laying around to make sure it all fits as it should. It does.

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Rail Detail

This is how the construct looks on the side where you slide in the disks. You
can see the pop rives I used to assemble it, the slots which are pictured being
milled above for the screwheads and the screws on the disks. You can also see
the recesses into which the screws mounted on the HDDs lock. The system works
very well.

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Ventilation

Obviously, 24 HDDs are going to put out some heat, so some ventilation is
required. I'm using six Papst fans for that. The fans will be bolted onto the
panels with some L profiles. Unfortunately, 120 mm fans have 105 mm hole
distance, and HDDs are ~100 mm wide, so it's not possible to mount the fan on
both sides, only two screws can be used. It's not really a problem though, two
screws tightened down nicely give sufficient stability.

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Mounting Brackets

The panels are mounted to the bottom and top of the case with screws. To have
some leeway in adjusting things, there are slots instead of round holes in some
places.

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Top:

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Bottom:

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Fan Mounting

Since the fan screws need to be tightened rather heavily, the screws exert quite
a bit of pressure on the fan frames. To prevent the fan frames from being
crushed and/or breaking, we made some brass bushings that take the brunt of the
pressure.

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And Mounted

And finally the disk racks are mounted inside the case.

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Disk Mounting

The Disks just slide into the slots and lock into place in the recesses you can
see above. Since I can't tighten the screws, I'm using Loctite to prevent them
from falling out due to vibration. I tried to get some screws similar to those
Lian Li use for their HDD mounting, but the only ones I could find were so
expensive that they'd have cost me more than 100 USD. So yeah, nope...

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There's still lots to do, but that was by far the most work intensive part of
this build, took us quite a while to get it done. And no, it won't be painted or
anything, the server will stand in a closed room in our appartment anyway. I'd
have loved to make it all pretty and nice, but at the moment I just don't have
the time.


So long, and until next time.
-aw

 

[Bartacus]

Wow, great job on those disk racks!! Great work! Are you doing custom power/SATA cabling on the hard drives?

 

[alpenwasser]

Wow, great job on those disk racks!! Great work! Are you doing custom power/SATA cabling on the hard drives?

Thanks, I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Well, custom cabling is a bit of an overstatement. The PSU comes with two
cables that are long enough to serve one disk tower each, so I'll just be running
those down each disk stack and put more SATA connectors on them. It'll
be nice and tidy.

The SATA cables I'll leave as they are, I'll just try to get them as tidy as I can,
but I won't be sleeving them since it doesn't really make sense to spend the
money and time on it in this build.

So: Tidiness: Yes. Colour coordination: No.

 

[Bartacus]

Yummy, perfect SATA spacing, for once. I never understood why power supply manufactures always left so much bloody space between SATA connectors! HDD cages have been pretty much standard for spacing since the dawn of time.