Building a DIY Music Server

[baconbrain]

On 5/27/2023 at 4:01 PM, Nenon said:

Is anyone interested in any of my Troels Gravesen DIY speakers? I am trying to do some cleaning up and make space for the new speaker system I am working on (happy to share more on that when completed). 

 

I have a pair of Troels Gravesen ATS4-HE speakers I've built a few years ago. 

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/ATS4-HE.htm

I have spent over $10K plus ~200 hours to build these. Willing to sell them for around half of my cost. 

(they also have 12'' down firing woofers on the bottom that are not visible on the photos). 

 

Very impressive and beautiful finish!

[The Computer Audiophile]

New Streacom SG10

 

https://www.fanlesstech.com/2023/05/exclusive-streacom-sg10.html?m=1

 

[AudioDoctor]

4 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

New Streacom SG10

 

https://www.fanlesstech.com/2023/05/exclusive-streacom-sg10.html?m=1

 

 

That's interesting.

[Dev]

Did Taiko stopped selling the DIY case ? Don't see it being offered anymore.

[Nenon]

16 hours ago, Dev said:

Did Taiko stopped selling the DIY case ? Don't see it being offered anymore.

 

Yes, they stopped selling the DIY chassis. We always knew this was a one or two small batches thing.

 

If we do a group order for 10-15 chassis, we might be able to convince them to run another small batch. But other than that, I see no chances of convincing Taiko to do this again. 

[Exocer]

I regret missing my opportunity to own a Taiko chassis, but I am holding out hope for when/if HDplex release a full-size Fanless chassis. Also, I may ultimately stick with two separate chassis long-term. It has served me very well.

 

 

[Dev]

2 hours ago, Nenon said:

Yes, they stopped selling the DIY chassis. We always knew this was a one or two small batches thing.

 

humm…I was under the impression that they were selling DIY parts to support the DIY community that they always wanted to. In fact, they wrote this either here or the other forum, can’t remember. Being so expensive, my guess they weren’t selling them well either. 

 

Hopefully Hdplex or Streacom releases one eventually. 

[littlej0e]

2 hours ago, Exocer said:

I regret missing my opportunity to own a Taiko chassis, but I am holding out hope for when/if HDplex release a full-size Fanless chassis. Also, I may ultimately stick with two separate chassis long-term. It has served me very well.

 

 

The DIY chassis is high quality to be sure, but some of the tolerances were maddening. I never assumed I would have to mod a DIY chassis to get PCIE cards to fit properly.

 

Truth is, I went with an external power supply design and don't even need the Taiko DIY chassis. I only purchased one because I wanted to support Taiko supporting the DIY community. I guess the juice isn't worth the squeeze for them anymore, if it ever was in the first place.

 

Hit me up if you really want a Taiko DIY chassis. I wouldn't mind swapping it out with someone that will actually leverage all the space and design considerations it provides. 

[Exocer]

29 minutes ago, littlej0e said:

Hit me up if you really want a Taiko DIY chassis. I wouldn't mind swapping it out with someone that will actually leverage all the space and design considerations it provides. 

Thanks so much for the offer. Since I will be sticking with the SOTM board/single CPU setup for the long haul I suspect the chassis can go to an even better dual CPU home than mine. Very generous of you!

[kraftundkultur]

This Streacom case was not built for the DIY community. there is a chance that it is water-cooled

I don't understand why it is not possible to build a TPD version in passive design for HDPlex or Streacom?

[MarcelNL]

5 minutes ago, kraftundkultur said:

This Streacom case was not built for the DIY community. there is a chance that it is water-cooled

I don't understand why it is not possible to build a TPD version in passive design for HDPlex or Streacom?

that is easy enough, I guess there are too few folks using high TDP CPU's in fanless systems...the gaming folks will resort to water cooling or even liquid nitrogen or similar so the market is small... 

[kraftundkultur]

Marcel if they are not produced, there is no need for it.

[MarcelNL]

6 minutes ago, kraftundkultur said:

Marcel if they are not produced, there is no need for it.

you may want to google Johan Cruijff, he made similar statements ;-)

 

 

[JJSim]

For their new SG10 Streacom partnered with Calyos, which has an interesting portfolio of products. Their "2-phase" cooling solutions are particularly intriguing for use in DIY servers, by using a refrigerant instead of water in a 100% passive system without the need for a pump to circulate the fluid.

 

https://www.calyos-tm.com/technologies/loop-heat-pipes

 

It doesn't appear they have any off the shelf products, so anything they offer would be custom made and probably very expensive.

 

 

[MarcelNL]

interesting stuff, but isn't every heatpipe essentially a 2 phase cooling solution?

water evaporates at the CPU and rises, to condensate at the heatsink and flow back to the CPU.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe

 

Using 6 on the Ryzen 16 core and not exceeding 40'C core temperature

[JJSim]

Conceptually, yes. Although the use of a refrigerant instead of water is unique. Utilizing a dedicated condenser in a closed-loop system is also different than the traditional use of a metal chassis wall acting as a heatsink.

 

Only first hand experience will tell if this solution is a viable alternative to present offerings. Turemetal released their passive chassis a while ago, and then Taiko developed an effective solution with their heatpipe coolers.

[littlej0e]

  

40 minutes ago, JJSim said:

For their new SG10 Streacom partnered with Calyos, which has an interesting portfolio of products. Their "2-phase" cooling solutions are particularly intriguing for use in DIY servers, by using a refrigerant instead of water in a 100% passive system without the need for a pump to circulate the fluid.

 

https://www.calyos-tm.com/technologies/loop-heat-pipes

 

It doesn't appear they have any off the shelf products, so anything they offer would be custom made and probably very expensive.

 

 

 

21 minutes ago, JJSim said:

Conceptually, yes. Although the use of a refrigerant instead of water is unique. Utilizing a dedicated condenser in a closed-loop system is also different than the traditional use of a metal chassis wall acting as a heatsink.

 

Only first hand experience will tell if this solution is a viable alternative to present offerings. Turemetal released their passive chassis a while ago, and then Taiko developed an effective solution with their heatpipe coolers.

 

Now THIS is interesting...

 

I did some testing this past weekend with a couple of higher core Gold and Platinum CPUs. Most ended up beating the 4109Ts, 4110s, 4210s, and 4214s quite handily in nearly every category, save for naturalness and texture (Taiko/Emile definitely new what they were doing using the 4210s). Differences between some of the CPUs were not small. Unfortunately, the higher core CPUs cannot operate exclusively using passive cooling on the Taiko DIY chassis (without tripling or quadrupling the heat sink surface area at a minimum). I ended up using active cooling with external fans/fan controller hooked up to a separate power supply just so I could test other CPUs without melting my rig. The results were so promising, however, that I am now considering purchasing a dedicated, externally controlled/monitored/powered liquid cooling chassis (which means my music server would then be comprised of three separate chassis because...stupid lol. Perhaps I should call this build "The Faiko Extreme - Extra Chromosome Edition").

 

In any case, there does appear to be a loose, but tangible, correlation between core count and audio performance specific to Roon. Though to what degree and how well it scales, I'm not really sure. Emile's design proved that high power servers can achieve equal, or better, performance compared to low power. So I can't help but wonder what would happen if we take Taiko's design methodology a step further and combine it with an even higher power ULPS and higher core count CPUs. Could we achieve performance beyond that of a legit Taiko Extreme? Seems worth investigating seeing as DIY'rs have the luxury of not being constrained by commercial viability.

 

Any idea what the "real world" heat dissipation/relative performance is of the Calyos solution(s)? They seem to support up to 2 x 350W CPUs, but I'm always skeptical. 

[MarcelNL]

22 minutes ago, JJSim said:

Conceptually, yes. Although the use of a refrigerant instead of water is unique. Utilizing a dedicated condenser in a closed-loop system is also different than the traditional use of a metal chassis wall acting as a heatsink.

 

Only first hand experience will tell if this solution is a viable alternative to present offerings. Turemetal released their passive chassis a while ago, and then Taiko developed an effective solution with their heatpipe coolers.

 

 

I'm using a standard issue 300W heatsink and standard industrial heatpipes with water in them, there is nothing new or special in heatpipes or heatsinks. a closed loop is interesting and I'd like to see more data on efficiency and max power transport etc.

 

someone earlier posted flat heatpipes filled with something like acetone, I do not see the big novelty using refrigerant, it's just another liquid going into vapor and all will go BOOM when overheated ;-)

 

My main question is, do we need a closed loop system when regular heatpipes do quite well?

 

 

 

[botrytis]

Acetone is a nono - too volatile and is reactive

 

Ethanol - pure - would be better

[JJSim]

18 minutes ago, littlej0e said:

  

 

 

Now THIS is interesting...

 

I did some testing this past weekend with a couple of higher core Gold and Platinum CPUs. Most ended up beating the 4109Ts, 4110s, 4210s, and 4214s quite handily in nearly every category, save for naturalness and texture (Taiko/Emile definitely new what they were doing using the 4210s). Differences between some of the CPUs were not small. Unfortunately, the higher core CPUs cannot operate exclusively using passive cooling on the Taiko DIY chassis (without tripling or quadrupling the heat sink surface area at a minimum). I ended up using active cooling with external fans/fan controller hooked up to a separate power supply just so I could test other CPUs without melting my rig. The results were so promising, however, that I am now considering purchasing a dedicated, externally controlled/monitored/powered liquid cooling chassis (which means my music server would then be comprised of three separate chassis because...stupid lol. Perhaps I should call this build "The Faiko Extreme - Extra Chromosome Edition").

 

In any case, there does appear to be a loose, but tangible, correlation between core count and audio performance specific to Roon. Though to what degree and how well it scales, I'm not really sure. Emile's design proved that high power servers can achieve equal, or better, performance compared to low power. So I can't help but wonder what would happen if we take Taiko's design methodology a step further and combine it with an even higher power ULPS and higher core count CPUs. Could we achieve performance beyond that of a legit Taiko Extreme? Seems worth investigating seeing as DIY'rs have the luxury of not being constrained by commercial viability.

 

Any idea what the "real world" heat dissipation/relative performance is of the Calyos solution(s)? They seem to support up to 2 x 350W CPUs, but I'm always skeptical. 

 

Thanks for reporting your findings. It's long been a topic of debate over low core/power CPU's vs high core/power CPU's. Looking at the market of music servers available today, you can see the division between the two ideologies. The question always remains, however–how much is too much? Even a 12-core CPU is left twiddling its thumbs under a normal music playback workload (save for upsampling in HQPlayer). You can argue that even with extreme core counts and TDP, with such a small workload placed on the CPU it will draw less power and generate less heat than it's rated for. And having more cores allows for the workload to be distributed more evenly across the cores. But at what point is there diminishing returns?

 

There are also opponents and proponents of active cooling. On one hand active cooling can create vibrations and noise (both audible and electrical) that are detrimental to sound quality. On the other hand high temperatures can put greater stress on components, and keeping components at a lower temperature can improve sound quality. The best approach is a well implemented passive cooling system that is capable of dissipating the total amount of heat produced by the server. This is also the most difficult to develop. Taiko put much effort into developing the heatpipe system in the Extreme. But sometimes additional cooling is still needed. Taiko had to redesign their network card to include a copper heatsink as the cards were shutting down due to high temperatures. This buildup of heat inside the chassis can have a parasitic affect on the entire server. Active cooling, even in the form of an externally powered fan blowing air over the components, can have a positive result on sound quality.

[MarcelNL]

that Taiko network card shut down due to the chip getting warm and a threshold setting in the firmware being quite low...in my system the Solarflare NIC gets awfully hot too, it's heatsink is simply not designed for room temperature and not having forced air blowing over it does not help but as you can see at Streamfidelity's shop f.e. those issues can be overcome with passive cooling.

[littlej0e]

2 hours ago, JJSim said:

 

Thanks for reporting your findings. It's long been a topic of debate over low core/power CPU's vs high core/power CPU's. Looking at the market of music servers available today, you can see the division between the two ideologies. The question always remains, however–how much is too much? Even a 12-core CPU is left twiddling its thumbs under a normal music playback workload (save for upsampling in HQPlayer). You can argue that even with extreme core counts and TDP, with such a small workload placed on the CPU it will draw less power and generate less heat than it's rated for. And having more cores allows for the workload to be distributed more evenly across the cores. But at what point is there diminishing returns?

 

There are also opponents and proponents of active cooling. On one hand active cooling can create vibrations and noise (both audible and electrical) that are detrimental to sound quality. On the other hand high temperatures can put greater stress on components, and keeping components at a lower temperature can improve sound quality. The best approach is a well implemented passive cooling system that is capable of dissipating the total amount of heat produced by the server. This is also the most difficult to develop. Taiko put much effort into developing the heatpipe system in the Extreme. But sometimes additional cooling is still needed. Taiko had to redesign their network card to include a copper heatsink as the cards were shutting down due to high temperatures. This buildup of heat inside the chassis can have a parasitic affect on the entire server. Active cooling, even in the form of an externally powered fan blowing air over the components, can have a positive result on sound quality.

 

Excellent info, thank you very much! I also hope I didn't inadvertently kick a hornets nest with the high power/vs low power argument. I only wanted to report what I personally tested as many of the results were not subtle. As a result, I can't help but stand firmly in the "more cores = more better" camp, but my sample size/e-peen is small and inexperienced.  As for the question of, "how much is too much?", increasing core counts seems to scale linearly with user insanity - haha! Seems like striving to answer the "why" behind core counts with lower cost components is more a sane approach than spending between 4-6k for the highest core count CPUs that will run under the maximum wattage supported by the C621e motherboard. I wish I could personally investigate this further, but unfortunately I lack the time, tools, talent, and inclination to do so. 

 

Specifically regarding power, you hit the nail on the head - it's all about real world utilization and desired outcomes for this specific use case. The highest core CPUs I tested were 20 core Xeon Gold 6148s, which are rated at 150W under constant load. My rig momentarily peaked at approx. 170W during startup, then settled in at approx. 112W during normal operation (approx. 105W when undervolted the CPUs to 1.47V). Taking into account Intel's notional CPU power ratings and my recorded start up draw, I set a theoretical 150W-per-CPU maximum for testing other CPUs specifically with this ULPS (officially rated max around 200W). Using said estimated theoretical formula, the highest core CPU currently available that could safely pair with this ULPS is the 26 core Xeon Platinum 8164. This CPU also happens to be rated at 150W, discontinued, cheap, and readily available. A have a pair on the way for testing as we speak. The startup draw seems to be the biggest hurdle to using higher core CPUs with this ULPS design and as you stated - it's anyone's guess if doing so will result in a tangible increase in performance.  

 

Cooling is the other fly in the ointment, as you stated. Running tests with active air cooling was a total PITA due to fan noise, though this did have the added benefit of cooling other components in the chassis. However, removing heat directly from the CPUs and quickly removing it from the chassis should help prevent components from overheating as opposed to dumping it back and locking it in with passive cooling. This is why I am considering using a 100% external water cooling solution. All pumps, controls, gauges, radiators, fans, etc. are contained within an external chassis, so coolant flowing across the CPUs should be the only noise introduced...which unfortunately still could be significant. I'm almost certain you are right about passive cooling being the optimal solution. But to support high core CPUs kicking off this much heat I would have to run heat pipes through the chassis directly to a giant external copper brick or design a different chassis cooling solution all together. This is why the Calyos solutions are so intriguing. I submitted an inquiry, though I'm almost certain it will be prohibitively expensive as you stated...and may or may not completely solve the problem in the first place.

 

Do you, or anyone else, have any other ideas?

[JJSim]

Nothing more I can really suggest. I haven't even completed my server build, but have been studying the cooling aspect as I expect it will present one of the greatest challenges. The CPU's I am considering using all have TDP over 100W, but the only upsampling I intend to do is to high rate PCM through HQPlayer, which presents a very low load on the processor. But as I alluded to in my previous post, there are components other than the CPU that generate heat and the cumulative buildup of temperature can have a very negative impact on performance. I expect that I will at first try all passive cooling and then experiment with adding a slow spinning fan inside the chassis to circulate air. There are ways to address the negatives of active cooling (soft mounting to lessen vibration, externally powering fans, etc.) The problem with AIO coolers is that there are now two sources of vibration and noise; the fans on the heat exchanger and the pump that circulates the fluid. This is why the all passive design presented by Calyos is intriguing. Or the fully external approach that you described.

 

IMO Taiko has the most elegant solution with the heatpipe coolers offered with the DIY chassis. Last I inquired they were able to sell just the coolers, but I have decided to use a 3rd gen scalable processor which uses a different socket.

 

I was considering sending an inquiry to Calyos but I expect they will need detailed measurements and even CAD drawings, all of which is over my head. I am interested to hear what they tell you.

[flkin]

5 hours ago, littlej0e said:

…

Cooling is the other fly in the ointment, as you stated. Running tests with active air cooling was a total PITA due to fan noise, though this did have the added benefit of cooling other components in the chassis. However, removing heat directly from the CPUs and quickly removing it from the chassis should help prevent components from overheating as opposed to dumping it back and locking it in with passive cooling. This is why I am considering using a 100% external water cooling solution. All pumps, controls, gauges, radiators, fans, etc. are contained within an external chassis, so coolant flowing across the CPUs should be the only noise introduced...which unfortunately still could be significant. I'm almost certain you are right about passive cooling being the optimal solution. But to support high core CPUs kicking off this much heat I would have to run heat pipes through the chassis directly to a giant external copper brick or design a different chassis cooling solution all together. This is why the Calyos solutions are so intriguing. I submitted an inquiry, though I'm almost certain it will be prohibitively expensive as you stated...and may or may not completely solve the problem in the first place.

 

Do you, or anyone else, have any other ideas?

Have you considered external, active cooling through the sucking action of a fan? Not touching the streamer nor electrical in the same circuit. 
 

I float a suction fan on the outside and above my streamer’s CPU and the hot air extracted is significant. 

[MarcelNL]

you can design your own passive cooling system, but you'll have to bend your own heatpipes and route your heatsink....two large -ish 300W heatsinks should be perfectly capable of taking care of around 125W TDP CPU's

 

What TDP are you looking at?