@carbogger shared an updated BIOS. Here is v5 for those looking for it - bit.ly/3Pv2GFx I might give one final crack at this after updating. If there's no second video, you already know why.

@doomboots

2 ай бұрын

Amibios has some interesting options in there as well. Might help out. Not to mention you can set a custom fan curve in the bios of the rightmost card if you're looking at the side with the connectors. I did that as soon as I could. Then I replaced the 80mm fans with 3x140mm bgears b blasters (900cfm total) now I can survive with it In my office lol. AC infinity has some nice triple 120mm faceplates that can be modified or some people reportedly use 4u blanks. Gotta drill the rivets out to remove the front faceplate though. Worth it lol

@doomboots

2 ай бұрын

Bios editor that is. They do support pxe too.

@castor9907

2 ай бұрын

excited to see if anything ends up coming of this, being able to salvage these things with a bios update would be great for making a bunch of mining ewaste into something useful

"Not everyone's crazy enough to have a server rack out in their garage" always makes me smile. Mine's in my bedroom.

@manitoba-op4jx

2 ай бұрын

maintaining a remote gaming rig isn't the hassle, it's paying for the gpu.

@ToucheFarming

2 ай бұрын

My server racks are in my bedroom as well 😂

@kellymoses8566

2 ай бұрын

Racks are way too loud to have in your bedroom.

@buddybleeyes

2 ай бұрын

You mad lad, how tf do you live? 🤣🤣🤣

@ToucheFarming

2 ай бұрын

@@kellymoses8566 true but I manage

Never stop doing this series... im actually setting one of these up and your videos are quite helpful

"The only thing from preventing me from loosing a finger..." I won't lie, I was expecting a quick cut to Jay chopping carrots on a Delta Fan

@CraftComputing

2 ай бұрын

I considered that clip!

"Oh hey, each of these compute units is more powerful than my main machine, and there's twel....Oh Jeff has scotch, maybe i shouldn't buy this"

@CraftComputing

2 ай бұрын

Those who know look for a bottle before 'adding to cart' 😁

@RHightower

2 ай бұрын

@@CraftComputingI never noticed this before... interesting

@mikes78

2 ай бұрын

@@CraftComputing I certainly don't love my power company enough to give them this level of donations. I don't blame you for quietly (or even loudly) fuming over this one.

@thirdwheel1985au

2 ай бұрын

Yep I too saw the scotch and knew what to expect.

7:35 that fan ramp-up.. i feel like it should culminate with a laser blast and large detonation in the far off distance.

@samiraperi467

2 ай бұрын

Or at least acceleration and takeoff.

@yokailover

2 ай бұрын

WHATT????????

@frogboy2002

2 ай бұрын

“That’s no moon…”

@SpoonHurler

2 ай бұрын

it's a little loud....

@HeSuesHeScores

2 ай бұрын

The last sound heard on Alderaan.

Man, I've been following for years. Not having the space or money for server's myself- I live through you. Never stop ♥️

Call Wendell... I've been waiting for a collaboration for years... Both of you have the same mindset and passion....

"highland park 12, because, f*** this thing." I'm surprised there's any left in the bottle with this one.

Thanks for taking one for the team. I have to admit, the specs caught my attention. True to form your experience just saved me $700. Thanks again!

Awesome vid as im watching it thru so far, and good to see Hardware Haven mentioned/shown too!

@CraftComputing

2 ай бұрын

Dude beat me to the punch on this useless chip :-D

It's quite a journey when you have to break out the good old stuff to deal with the troubles a project put you through. Thx for the chuckle at the end.

It's not even just that the fans are loud... that frequency seems particularly brutal.

Good of you to mention the Chips and Cheese article. Definitely a bright spot in tech journalism.

I learned of that servers existence a few days ago. Now I’ve got a video to watch about it! Perfect timing!

So glad you did this Jeff, just because. What a cool crazy piece.

6:20 Sony doesn't use Vulkan, they use a proprietary internal API called AGC on PS5. The only game console with Vulkan available to the developer is the Nintendo Switch, and that is also very rarely used in light of NVN (a proprietary NVIDIA API).

Really enjoying the last few videos like this.

This was hilarious to watch. I can't even tell you my favorite part as there was so many. I think it was a nice touch to hear those fans just getting higher and higher in frequency, while watching your face so that's at least in the top three. I am so sorry "for your loss" (more e-waste, 3-days of hacking...) but THANK YOU for the entertainment and also for me being able to watch a really smart dude at work. Treat yourself to Highland Park 18 (not 12, not 25). It's better than what you have as a 2kw "garage space heater".

@CraftComputing

2 ай бұрын

If you look carefully, my hair is blowing in the wind.

Man. What an insane server. There is so much potential in that box.

That intermezzo with the jet engine right after "what could go wrong" is just soooo fun to watch😂

Mad respect, Jeff. It takes a lot to showcase a fail. Excellent video, on every level. I want those fans.

""what could go wrong" - famous last words in the IT world

Thank you for spending time/money on dumb experiments so we don't have to. Your service is appreciated.

What makes this so sad, is the difficulty of repurposing these machines, so they become e-waste, was a deliberate act by everyone in the manufacturing process.

Almost all servers and enterprise storage arrays are that loud or louder. You can’t imagine what a cold start to a data center sounds like. I think a 747 is quieter.

@Prophes0r

2 ай бұрын

I've heard my fair share of screamers. I'm dumb enough to buy enterprise networking gear and use it until neighbors complain. But a buddy of mine also bought one of these and it is really loud. Like, more than expected given our experience. The only thing I can compare these fans to are EDFs or mid-sized quadcopter motors.

@hicknopunk

2 ай бұрын

​@@Prophes0roh gawd

@DLTX1007

2 ай бұрын

Oh bet, I once had a gigabyte 2U Epyc server had its fans stuck on full. 4 of them were PFM0812HE-01s... Rated 7A max!

really enjoyed this video, the whole vibe of this video reminds me of so many (quite minor compared to this) "great bargain" projects I've gotten into. 👍

Everytime I watch one of your videos, I always get the small thought that you're Cody's Lab as a well maintained/classy version

Jeff you may want to check out the v5 bios and see if that behaves any differently. Most units ship with v3 or even v2. As for mining, they seem to have big driver issues with later linux kernels and we default to 5.15.0 with amd drivers 22.20.5 for ocl support. I picked one up with my thought about these as some sort of ai related workload.

@isaacjjones

2 ай бұрын

Where might one find this v5 bios?

@IAmPattycakes

2 ай бұрын

I haven't been able to get any bioses for these, where are they?

@CraftComputing

2 ай бұрын

Just write it out (https) web.site/link Most links are immediately flagged. I don't even have control over it. I would be interested in seeing what the differences are, and if it would help with driver installs.

@isaacjjones

2 ай бұрын

@@carbogger there are several of us that DO have the hardware to test. If you would provide the link, we would greatly appreciate it. 👍

@CraftComputing

2 ай бұрын

@carbogger Got it, and approved the comment. It should show up here. I'll also be rehosting the file and linking it in the description. Thanks for sharing!

Amazing video. Even if nothing came from it your explanation of the steps you took and your analysis of the situation made it fascinating. Consider me subscribed.

Now I see why Zeuxs will heat his garage with this unit

I need these fans in my life!

Thank you for the review, even though it was a failure! I would have considered buying such a rig and would have attempted the same thing!

It also gets louder under a full load. Also if you cut the metal mesh off the fans, in nulls the sound. I know because I have 5 of them

Literally spitted my coffee when the sound started lmao

Dang, sorry you couldn't get this running. I was all excited at the price point, to use for BOINC.

I think the loudest bit of server kit I worked on was an HP C7000 blade enclosure, when you first turned it on, it was like a small jet engine. Then the management agents kicked in, and slowed the chassis fans down.....🙂

one blade might look pretty sick on your shelf

The BC250 is a cut down version with 6 cores 12 threads. It is made of the APUs that didn't pass QC for a PS5

Since they have unified memory, they might be useful as a cheap LLM server, if you can change the ratio between the CPU/GPU, that's nearly 192 GB of VRAM. OpenCL might be good enough to run the current state of the art LLMs on.

@iraqigeek8363

2 ай бұрын

Only problem is that they're limited to 1gb ethernet for communicating between nodes. I looked into this a while back, and the latency between nodes would just kill the performance

@AI-xi4jk

2 ай бұрын

But they are physically separate chunks of memory. Not sure how efficient would it be to run a distributed model if possible at all with 1Gbps interlink.

@GeekProdigyGuy

2 ай бұрын

​@@iraqigeek8363even the lowest latency 100gbe interconnects would be a major bottleneck so a plain 1 gig most definitely won't cut it.

@Mike-xy4jz

2 ай бұрын

@@iraqigeek8363 a 10G m.2 could be added.

@ghost-lp9cv

2 ай бұрын

@@iraqigeek8363using a 10GbE m.2 adapter could fix that.

"A couple of Haswell Xeons..." just made em smile. I got a triple of those, two 14cores and a 12 cores. Two running my DSM Nases and one as the main machine. All for a neat $600.

Ok... that outtake at the end got me lol!

I am sure glad you did this video. I almost bought 1 of those cards on eBay for 85 dollars. Thank you.

Would like to see a part 2 with some of the suggestions. Just to lower that TOC for that CAPEX report.

Woo love watching Jeff and Colton save Ewaste from dumpsters to watch it turn into a dumpster fire! I honestly live vicariously through yall as it's everything I'd love to do 😂

It would make a great heater with the bonus feature of a noise generator. :)

I used to live next to the highland park distillery in Orkney. Try the 18 year old, it costs way more than the 12 but it well worth the additional cost!

Reminds me of my misadventures into the HP C-7000 with 16 blades.

Interesting to see tekelec frame style servers in a small case like that. Just their number porting solution took up an entire rack or two.

The ramping up like a jet going for takeoff made me giggle.

The GPU can manage 10TF of fp32 compute, so across all 12 you have 120TF, which is one and a half 4090s. You also have more memory than the 4090. So this could be a good box for some HPC workload with very high parallelism. Maybe Monte Carlo simulation?

One more thing- the shape of the board would enable easy submersed cooling (in oil), with plugs facing upwards :-)

Nice to have your own, home based jet engine. :)

This video was a rollercoaster :D

companion Craft Computing, a concrete commitment, more cloud gaming for everyone✊😅

The devil's in the details. Nice overview of some interesting hardware, thanks for the video.

We're starting with the bottle on the table already and in the thumbnail. I'm a simple man. I see that in a Craft thumbnail, I'm already invested. When you turned it on, did the dogs three blocks over start just howling? I think one of those fans could cool a small apartment. So much hardware for so cheap but... it's e-waste that's power hungry. I'd really love it if there were a 'fix' to use this in some way other than crypto.

There are kits that use (3) 140mm fans instead of the small ones. It really helps with the noise

7:31 if NASCAR ever switches over to all-electric vehicles, I suspect it will sound like this.

@MrNside

2 ай бұрын

If NASCAR ever switched to electric, the drivers would all be able to go take a nap during pit stops.

There are a few of us out there that ARE crazy enough to have server racks in their house. When you turned on your server, it immediately went into what's called "panic mode". That's why it went screaming off. In some racks it even makes a difference whether the case lid is on or not. They actually measure air pressure going through the rack. After a very short period of time, those fans would spin down to a fairly quiet mode, pending how hard you are pushing the blades. Those servers sound like they could be used as headless Linux servers for gaming emulators, such as Everquest, World Of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, etc... All you need to build servers for those kinds of games is a stable server version of Linux and a few separate network adapters installed in the rack/server.

@cgooch_

2 ай бұрын

I may own a bunch of these units. The fans start off at 40% and only get worse from there. Even with the case lid on. They are intolerable at their lowest speeds. - Reversing the fan direction helps soften the shrillness of it all but they’re still terribly loud.

Lol I saw the literal same listing a month back and basically had the same monologue as you in the intro. I guess I dodged a bullet XD If you want more bad investment advice - there's also a similar mining chassis from Sapphire with nerfed and passively cooled RX 6700

@primerib7377

2 ай бұрын

Link?

Well done, failure yes but your work to get there was the enjoyment. Keep the fans!

@CraftComputing as far as I remember, you can still copy DXVK's dll files on Windows and they should translate your DirectX calls to Vulkan the same as they do on the Linux side! I tried that with some games (LoL and 2015ish Star Wars) and they worked better with my RX 5700 XT under this Vulkan translation layer than DirectX11 using Windows 10, maybe try it out in a next video!

@crayzeape2230

2 ай бұрын

Was going to say the exact same thing. DXVK dll files work fine in windows, though best copying the to individual game folders rather than using them system wide. And yes, DXVK on windows is often faster the DirectX11 due to multi-threading.

@LtdJorge

2 ай бұрын

@@crayzeape2230the thing is the PS5 doesn’t actually use Vulkan, so I don’t know if that would even work.

@crayzeape2230

2 ай бұрын

@@LtdJorge The GPU supports Vulkan 1.2 according to the video 6:17

There's T-Shirt design for you "Uhh.... Noise is going to be a factor" with a picture of that thing. I'd probably buy it.

It sounds like it was taking off!

Thank you for your efforts. I wish this would have worked, because it seems like a great opportunity to run a local "cloud" gaming cluster, but clearly, it wasn't meant to be. Hopefully something pans out eventually on this front.

Damn that would have been cool as hell. I would have watched your 3 days of struggle, but I understand the frustration of editing that much stuff only to have to take the L. You'll get'm next time Jeff.

Did you try using this as a blender render, transcoding or plex server? I'm assuming with the comment earlier about the 1FPS streaming means a no but might be good to check.

Hahaha. The noise is amazing! That’s fracking awesome. You could repel mosquitos and loitering teenagers with that. It reminds me why I didn’t put bitcoin ASICS in my house. Even though this was a failure, I am glad to hear about your experiment.

Must say I got really excited when you mentioned the price and then less excited later on😢. Wish this worked. Minus the power draw could it still be useful for a vdi clister of sorts?

I'm working on using a BC-250 as a standalone computer, and this video has plenty of information that I haven't found anywhere else simply because of how obscure this server is. Hopefully this video helps bring more attention to this device because it's got a ton of untapped potential!

@hermysdorfff

Ай бұрын

Did you succed?

@malloott

19 күн бұрын

Did you get 3d acceleration working?

The noise can be mitigated by replacing the fans with bigger ones to get the same air flow. This might require a front plate replacement. I did not see in the video what was the stock mining OS that might be your best bet for making any use of the unit.

install some ducting from the back of the chassis, to your living space, and use it as a space heater?

A nutty project I've been kicking the idea around was to get my hands on an 8 socket server. I don't know what I would do with it, or where I would put the thing, or why I need that much redundancy, but I want it

@LtdJorge

2 ай бұрын

That’s not redundancy, tho

@scott2100

2 ай бұрын

@@LtdJorge some 8 socket servers allow you to hot swap processors and memory as they are frequently on carrier boards

Thinking of blades, it would be nice to see a pc-on-a-pcie-card where the pcie interface functioned as the network. CommVision had these in the 1990's running 386 "edge servers". Its easier to run long DP/HDMI and USB than 100G fibre around the house.

It would make a Fantastic paperweight, or a step.

Would be a killer option for test machines in the homelab, or little web servers maybe... I would definitely have to modify the cooling system though... Having dual NICs would be nice, which you can get in similar multi-node systems like a SuperMicro MicroCloud.

@ZiggyDaZigster

2 ай бұрын

Plenty of things this server can still be used for. The question isn't what can it be used for, but what can it be used for to justify the power required on the machine.

@Trainguyrom

2 ай бұрын

There are other 2u4node or 4u8-12node servers available on Ebay for much more and much less than this that would work better for such usecases

@CraftComputing

2 ай бұрын

@Ziggy Correct. Like I said, performance was somewhere around Zen 1, but at 90W power draw. A 16-core Haswell would destroy this with similar idle and peak draw.

@CraftComputing perhaps the Linux kernel or OpenGl driver package just needs a few lines f code changed to recognise the gpu as it cannot be architecturally different form normal Radeon GPU so just a case of pci id being updated somewhere?

Would be interesting how well it could run some HPC workloads.

7:45 - That was clearly made and setup for mining, you definitely should be able to modify it to be a lot more quite, though it won't be really quite, you still would need high pressure fans to push through these heatsinks, but like, 5k rpm fans would be still sufficient Have you tried swapping the node you tried this all on? It could have been that specific node being very much broken?

Would be tempted to try hashcat and ffmpeg if possible.

Great adventure

Looks like a good candidate for a high availability cluster.

@Vatharian

2 ай бұрын

but HA of WHAT. Nothing works on this...

@zweiblali3410

2 ай бұрын

​@@Vatharian High availability heating, with this power draw.

Would these nodes be good for something like tdarr? I'd imagine that kind of core density would be great for transcoding tasks.

I'm sorry, Jeff, did you say something? Lol. I giggled in your suffering when those fans hit full tilt.

Holy hell dude!

You are so going to have to try out submersing this whole server in non-conductive coolant!!

I’m so curious about the ai performance is like? Specifically image and documentation classification

My garage is fully detached and uninsulated. And 100 years old. Just dealing with the spiders would be a pain in the ass.😅 This is one of those looks too good to be true, because it IS too good to be true things. Depreciation is one thing, but dropping from $15K to $700 is a massive red flag. One thing to keep in mind is that more than any time before, the people designing building and selling stuff like this are in our age group, they know we're always scouting for deals on the sly, and exactly how to thwart that. How hard they go on it is largely down to how locked down their legal department wants to be on things. Those folks are also onto us, only they're not under any pressure or financial incentive to reduce e-waste, resulting in dead ends like that power hungry banshee. Any wins you get after jumping through hoops to get stuff to work are because it's not worth it to them to make it near impossible. Those fans are hilarious though. Send them to Linus or Jay so they can do stupid things with them. If they'd included DX support but disabled Open CL so as to appease Sony, I could see a small shop located somewhere with cheap power using this for remote terminals. Use whatever you want to remote into one of those nodes for a full and secure desktop experience. Setup an inexpensive storage server to house their data data and you're good. I mean why would you want someone selling the guts of your main gaming product? I totally get that, and it's 100% reasonable. You wouldn't even need to emulate. What I would like to see is that the agreement would have an expiration date where say once the PS 6 came out and it reached some sales threshold, AMD can unlock whatever was disabled and release drivers, even if it means leaving something gimped to block running PlayStation software on it. It addresses the e-waste issue. Then you could have a more reasonable chassis with bigger quieter fans and maybe half the nodes so it doesn't need it's own substation. I don't like that ASRock or anyone else made crap like this to support mining, but I can't really fault them for making some quick and easy cash off of mining scum.

@CraftComputing

2 ай бұрын

I find that 24K RPM fans tend to deal with spiders quite easily.

Spins like a quadcoptor is taking off 😂

this was awesome

It would make a grate heater for the winter just set it up to mine any thing it makes will reduce your heating bill

I wonder if you could set them up as Vmware ESXi / Horizon View cluster to run a whole mess of virtual desktops with the GPUs passed through - I'd guess it'd still run into the driver / nerf problem and end up with a kneecapped / half efficient power goblin

Honestly still tempted lol.

@greenprotag

2 ай бұрын

I don't think I will be able to do any better by any means. It will take a village of community support devs. And will people donate their time? Who knows.

I would like to see this as a cluster running stablediffusion

I’m curious how it performs as a cluster virtualization server

Interesting, would you think this will make a good AI dev board, like testing it's ability on train models or hosting AI at home?

Failures are just as entertaining as wins when it comes to computing! And, lets not forget, some of your past failures DID end up in wins later down the line! "Tis but a scratch!"

@7.55 🤣 - supply the family with good quality ear guards!

would this work for rendering stuff? you could set it to be wake on lan and to only turn on to render something, upload it to a NAS and then turn off again. that would mean even though it uses alot of power it would not have the issue of idle power. That would only use one or two nodes though but you could probably just use one and shove it in a 1u server chasses and be done with it.