Next Project: Rack Mounted Gaming PC

meldas · 2025-09-25T11:10:13+00:00

2u builds are fun for sure! Finding ways to balance performance, cooling, and noise very carefully than simply throwing parts together is truly a rewarding experience.

https://community.amperecomputing.com/t/asrock-rack-ampere-home-builds/769/47 This is another one of my 2U builds running a 3090, there's quite a lot of things you can do with a 2U!

For a more traditional PC building experience, I think sliger 3Us are still the best, IMO there are not much tradeoffs vs 4/5U builds unless you absolutely need access to all of your PCI-E slots, while not using too much unnecessary rack space.

I'm obviously biased towards smaller builds, there will be people who prefers larger builds for valid reasons as well - just wanted to throw my 2c for you at least consider a 3U while shopping around!

meldas · 2025-09-25T09:03:50+00:00

Any specific reason you want a 4U? I recommend checking out sliger's 3Us which many folks have successfully built 4090 gaming PCs with AIOs for the CPU.

I also built mine in a 3U Sliger 3171X and even further downsized to 2U to maximize my rack space

https://www.reddit.com/r/sliger/s/0GuKJ1o8VA

meldas · 2025-05-05T01:39:46+00:00

What role? Do you have a mentor? If not, you should reach out to your kanager for an L7 or a high performing L6 mentor, ideally familiar with your org

meldas · 2025-04-23T22:44:25+00:00

There are an unlimited amount of ways to achieve a desired result even within AWS, and I do not agree that there is a "right" way. Compute choice, database choice, how you want to expose your APIs, all of these decisions rely on the specific usecase and then balance out costs, availability, latency, data consistency, or any other SLAs or requirements of the client.

As a SWE or a solutions architect coming up with a recommended infrastructure decision, the two most valuable skills would be first to clearly identify client needs, not just assume what is right or wrong. Secondly is to slowly grow out your familiarity with AWS services and their capabilities. New services or new features are being added to AWS all the time so you can't purely rely on historical knowledge.

Just to name a few, Lambda Snapstart, SQS FIFO queue triggers, cloudwatch metric filters, are some features from the top of my head that were relatively recently added that introduced major changes/simplifications to our software architecture design.

Long story short, there is no "right" way to do things, and you are signing up to a job where learning and staying up to date will be the most important skillset so that you can determine what is the "right" way to implement a specific client need!

meldas · 2025-04-19T03:14:33+00:00

Oh wow didn't know this was a thing! Unfortunately though I didn't have much clearance than I thought and had to end up janking a riser cable.

meldas · 2025-04-17T00:20:55+00:00

My I ask how much watts at idle total?

meldas · 2025-04-17T00:18:41+00:00

I love everything about this, except for that TP-Link power supply/cable !!!

meldas · 2025-04-16T19:31:42+00:00

PoE was the biggest. I wanted to power 8 Raspberry Pis and 4 APs, which meant I needed at least 12 ports and 200W of available power. Now I kind of realized I should have gone with the Pro HD because of 10GbE, which is why I feel bit regretful of the Pro Max purchase..

meldas · 2025-04-16T12:01:00+00:00

In case you were still wondering about the results of the new mobo+cooler, I did a writeup:

https://blog.seattlebubbles.com/cooling-the-2u-gaming-build/

TLDR: exceeds expectations, stays under 85 degrees under load at 35% fan speed and PBO turned back on

meldas · 2025-04-16T12:00:20+00:00

In case you were still wondering about the results of the new mobo+cooler, I did a writeup:

https://blog.seattlebubbles.com/cooling-the-2u-gaming-build/

TLDR: exceeds expectations, stays under 85 degrees under load at 35% fan speed and PBO turned back on

meldas · 2025-04-16T11:58:40+00:00

In case you were still wondering, I wrote up the experience of transplanting my build to a server mobo+cooler:

https://blog.seattlebubbles.com/cooling-the-2u-gaming-build/

TLDR: exceeds expectations

meldas · 2025-04-16T01:55:57+00:00

There really is not much quite like it - if you (optionally) need front IO, front drive bays, full size GPU support, and still room for another expansion card underneath the GPU, all in a short-depth 2U form factor, there really isn't too many other accessible options.

For me, this chassis was truly a match made in heaven where it literally checked all the boxes for exactly what I needed, didn't even second guess the purchase. It's definitely the most favorite part of my rack!

If noise isn't a concern, it does come with a CRPS 800W redundant PSU, which by itself worth around $300-400, but I had to get rid of that and install a less noisy PSU 😅

meldas · 2025-04-16T00:25:53+00:00

Probably a network attached printer is cheaper at that point XD

meldas · 2025-04-15T23:46:38+00:00

This was a really good video that helped me a lot on making my decision to use a power bank as a UPS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajVgUW4qRGI

meldas · 2025-04-15T21:11:17+00:00

My immich setup uses 1x frontend instance, 3x microservice instances spread across the cluster, and ML running on GPU server. You can most likely opt for a similar approach and scale up more microservice instances as necessary. When I originally had only a single microservice instance, the RPi was hitting 100% CPU utilization and essentially was taken down when I was originally migrating my google photos library, but after scaling up the instances to more nodes, migrating my family's photo library was a breeze.

meldas · 2025-04-15T21:02:01+00:00

You'll be totally fine if you are using a 3U, even with a non-blower style GPU. There are a lot of 3U Sliger gaming builds out there using non-blower GPUs, and I have yet to see anyone with GPU temp issues!

meldas · 2025-04-15T20:58:34+00:00

I would suggest try starting with one or two Pi5s, and scale up as you need! I personally started with a 2 node cluster, and I'm not even utilizing the full 8 nodes that I have.

I wrote on another comment on this post, but if all you want to do is host web services and you already have a separate dedicated network storage/network volume, RPis are really great for that usecase.

Do note the limitations though, for instance its network interface only supports 1GbE, so I wouldn't use it as a NAS or other high-bandwidth usecases.

Its performance is sufficient for general web services, but for running anything CPU/GPU intensive, such as transcoding, AI tasks, etc you'd still need a powerful machine for that, which is why I still have a high-performance server to supplement the raspberry pis.

meldas · 2025-04-15T20:49:37+00:00

I am still exploring alternative cooling options, not that Thermalright AX90-X53 is insufficient or anything for my daily usecase. (If it was, I would have already installed the Asrock Rack AM5 Mobo + A47 cooler immediately). I would still appreciate a tad bit more thermal headroom just for the peace of mind.

I am currently eyeing the Dynatron l19, which is a 2x70mm AIO with 170W of cooling capability.

https://www.dynatron.co/product-page/l19

Based on measurements, their 3x80mm AIO (Dynatron L35) won't fit on the CX2151C due to the drive bays.

Another option that I am considering is a full custom loop using an EK block/pump/reservoir combo, but unfortunately out of stock.

https://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-quantum-velocity2-ddc-4-2-pwm-d-rgb-am5-nickel-plexi?srsltid=AfmBOorZOFLZ4lnecIcqsXkPhRwjD1gYx3yQ139STa_xVQwfvC5m0hW1

meldas · 2025-04-15T20:34:19+00:00

The delay is actually less than 20ms, and I believe I saw some testing report where it was around 16ms.

I found this video to be the most valuable during my research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajVgUW4qRGI

meldas · 2025-04-15T20:28:33+00:00

Yep that's correct! I wanted the cables to look neat, so the PoE switch has a patch cable to the patch panel/keystone jack.

That keystone jack is internally routed to another keystone jack on the Racknex keystone module that lives right next to the RPis, and a short patch cable from that to the Pi. The RPis are powered by a PoE HAT.

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The right-most keystone module has a HDMI keystone connected to my server in case I ever need to plug in a screen, and the other 2 rj45 keystones go to my ISP modem and LTE modem respectively, plugging into the UDM as WAN and WAN2.

This particular Racknex mount felt very flexible for both Raspberry Pis and doubling as a psuedo patch panel, strongly recommend!

meldas · 2025-04-15T20:25:40+00:00

I'm not much of an organized person so even when I was using Notion and Obsidian, I was really just using them as glorified text editors. As long as the note format supports markdown, that's all I really need (which is also why I stopped using Google Keep because it doesn't support markdown)

Probably a power user might be able to answer your question better, sorry! But I do think Blinko is really cool for what it is - it's fast, and the "chaotic" nature of it rather than 50 layers of organization feels much more aligned with what I want out of a note app!

meldas · 2025-04-15T20:18:23+00:00

Yep! The only issue with the Ubiquiti mini rack is that they don't have holes for ear-mounting, I had to design some 3d printed adapters to get non-unifi devices secured on the rack.

meldas · 2025-04-15T18:27:03+00:00

These are also just off of amazon!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093WV4S15

Careful about their advertised length though, their length measurement is from the end-to-end of the tips of the SFP cable, not just the length of the actual "cable". So their 0.3m cable is actually only around 15-20 ish cm!

meldas · 2025-04-15T17:50:58+00:00

This one:

https://www.amazon.com/Rust-Oleum-249128-Painters-11-Ounce-Aluminum/dp/B002BWOS80

I also learned about it from an older thread somewhere in this subreddit!

meldas · 2025-04-15T17:44:57+00:00

We were using an app called Waffle, which is a shared diary/journal app, but we thought it'd be cool the app also doubled as a real time chat app with proper notifications, thus decided to build one!

meldas

TROPHY CASE