Nenon

Half height... but Jord has a solution for full height as well.

Met with Jord @Pink Faun at Axpona yesterday, and we talked in depth about his new USB card, and all the development and challenges he ran into before releasing it. It has supercaps that take about two minutes to fully charge. But you need to have power on startup, so the computer can initialize the chip and then you need to switch to supercaps power so quickly that the chip cannot detect it (think nanoseconds).

Great. That should work.

Agreed. That's would be the best solution. A few years ago when I was considering a cost no object server there were two things I wanted to engineer. One was a two chassis solution so when they are stacked there is a special plug on the top panel of the bottom chassis and on the bottom panel of the top chassis. This way you don't need an umbilical between the two. I had a pretty awesome sketch that I drew on a piece of paper. When I showed it to a manufacturer, he said "Oh no!!!" because it was super complicated to manufacture. The other one was PCIe DAC that eliminates the need for USB, similar idea as Taiko's XDMI. Those are probably extreme cases, but if you can design the two chassis to minimize the umbilical length, that will be awesome.

Sorry to ruin the party but I have to say this - a long umbilical between the ULPS and the Taiko ATX will negatively affect the sound quality. I would keep it as short as possible and make it with as thick wires as possible. I am saying this from personal experience but also had some interesting feedback. The only one time I've heard someone preferring a regulated linear power supply (the absolute best version of the teflon DR7 PH made before scamming dozens of my friends) over a well built unregulated LPS + Taiko ATX on the dual SAGE motherboard was when a two box solution was used with an umbilical over 1 meter long. I advised that person to redo his build with the Taiko chassis and the ULPS inside the chassis, and he never looked back. The bottom line is that the umbilical length is crucial and I advise against using two chassis.

I think discussing a chassis for the dual CPU Asus Sage build is right on topic here. After more than 4 years of experimentations, 245 pages, and trying many different motherboards and CPUs, nothing comes even close to the dual CPU Asus Sage, at least not on these DIY pages. Not even the custom purpose motherboards with fancy clocks, masterclocks, etc. But that dual CPU Asus Sage is quite difficult to passively cool down for multiple reasons. First, it's using a server based CPU with not so popular socket in the AV sector. Second, it has two CPUs. Third, the motherboard size is very big. As far as I am aware, only HDPlex has a working solution. HDPlex is pretty good at cooling down one 85W CPU but handling two is pushing the limits of its heatsinks. And as good as this DIY server sounds, if you can drop the temperature a bit, it sounds even better. This is where a better chassis will really shine. And that product does not exist. It will be really cool if you can make one, @AngeloVRA.

Great. I personally feel like the DIY community desperately needs a high end chassis, and what I've seen from your post looks like top notch quality. The forum rules are that you cannot advertise your own products but you can answer questions. So let me be the first to ask - how much are you planning to sell them for and how can people order it?

So this is a commercial product, not a DIY project?

@AngeloVRA - very nice work indeed. Is it big enough to accomodate a dual CPU ASUS Sage motherboard?

Those network cards are designed for servers where you have massive airflow from one side of the server to another. These servers have so many fans that they may sound like an airplane when you start them. Servers are racked in cabinets and on the hot side of the cabinet (where the hot air blows out) you have massive A/C units, usually blowing from the floor, that cool down the hot air. As we install between 2 and 6 of these per server, I've had thousands and thousands of these Solarflare cards going through my office. I've tried them on several occasions on my server and always had the same experience - my system sounds good with them in the first 20ish minutes and then it sounds worse than the onboard NIC. I have always attributed this to the higher temperature. So I would really advise considering using these only if you have a proper cooling solution. And even then, I wonder if the Intel I210-IS would end up being a better option. It should not be too hard to try cutting the PCIe power lanes and modding it for external power. If I were still doing DIY servers, I would be all over that and the copper plate @SK8 made.

Very little. And that was before my DIY Taiko server. A local friend and I did some experiments, and it was good at the time. Here are two scripts that you can try on Windows - they do some good things: https://gist.github.com/alirobe/7f3b34ad89a159e6daa1 https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script Also run the Taiko NIC installation script: https://taikoaudio.com/taiko-2020/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/networkcard_v2.x80569.zip And I usually set Power Option --> Advanced Settings --> Maximum processor state to 70%-80%. Play around with the Minimum processor state as well. Between those things and trimming down the OS with NiLite, you will have Windows mostly under control. By the way, you may have noticed my updated signature/industry disclosure. I contemplated sharing a detailed story about my unexpected transition into becoming a high-end audio dealer, but I realized this is off-topic. If anyone is curious, I'm open to sharing the story, whether publicly or privately. Ultimately, I've chosen to become a dealer for Taiko Audio, along with selecting a handful of other brands to represent but mainly catering around the new Taiko Olympus XDMI. It was a very quick and spontaneous decision, but that's how life is sometimes...

It's a balancing act. Adding fans is a compromise. So is passive cooling. - Keeping the temperature lower has big advantages on sound quality. - Not having the electrical noise associated with fans also has big advantages on sound quality. - As a general rule of thumb - never connect your fans to the motherboard. That may negate the benefits of lower temp (YMMV depending on how low the noise floor in the system is). I use a battery pack to power the fans whenever I use fans. That's much better than connecting them to the motherboard. And the of course the cooler temp is a sound quality improvement. So why not always use fans with a battery pack, then? IMO, it comes down to vibrations. Putting my server on various footers or stands makes a quite audible difference. The fan moves quite but of air and also causes some micro vibrations. In a super sensitive sensitive system, those things count. So, as I started this message - it's all a balancing act.

I recently managed to complete the DIY server that I've been trying to build for a friend since June 2022. I thought that putting the DIY chassis on the floor in the middle of my music room will make me work on this sooner. But over time I just got used to keeping those parts on the floor and walking around them. It took me about 18 months to complete :(. I am not proud of this and felt nothing short of embarrassed. This was the build I was planning to document and post detailed instruction on everything I have done. And perhaps this was one of the reasons why I kept postponing that work. But let's face it - the reality is with my Taiko Extreme server, Taiko USB, NIC, Switch, Router, DC Distributor, and XDMS NSM software my motivation to work on this DIY server was super low. I even had regrets that I commited to do this build, but I knew I had to do it. Eventually I realized I will never get this done, unless I take some shortcuts and make it easier for me. I had an Optane 900p PCIe card that was a backup (clone) of my previous DIY Windows LTSC installation. I realized I would not need that and gave it to my friend. So rather than starting from a fresh OS and documenting every step of the way I reused what I had done before and just applied new software licenses. I also applied a few new things that I've learned from Taiko, such as their network card installation script. The owner of that server and I independently compared Euphony to Windows as I had both available. He did it in his system. And I did it in my system. Both of us prefered Roon on Windows than Stylus on Euphony on this particular hardware. I would not say that was my experience previously with other hardware - I kind of had a preference for Euphony on previous DIY servers, but with the dual Xeon / SAGE build I have a strong preference for Windows. I've heard Euphony v4 on multiple occasions in other systems. V4 was a clear step up from the versions I've used previously, and I was very curious how it would compare to a well tweaked Windows installation on this hardware. Windows was the better sounding installation in both of our systems, at least on this hardware. But don't get me wrong - I still think Euphony is one of the best options for other DIY server types! However, there are things we can do on Windows that we can't do on Linux. One of them is the ASIO USB driver.

This needed sharing:

Thank you. I see how this back and forth started now. Timeout :). Clarification needed: I did not mean that they are NOT low noise. Not at all. My bad if it came across that way. What I meant was that I don't believe they are lower noise than XDMI. I haven't seen XDMI or the BPS in real life. But I have seen some XDMI measurements and they were quite impressive. I would say they were in a class of its own. And they better be, given the price tag!!! I completely understand! Since these were shared in private conversations I will respect the privacy. Did a quick search in WBF to see what was posted, but I found very little, mostly on voltage drops. https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/introducing-olympus-olympus-i-o-a-new-perspective-on-modern-music-playback.37939/post-931406 https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/introducing-olympus-olympus-i-o-a-new-perspective-on-modern-music-playback.37939/post-932132 More will come over time I am sure. Happy to revive that conversation then :).