Building a DIY Music Server

[baconbrain]

Any update on the Taiko Case?

 

Haven’t heard much after Taiko Audio received their CNC Machine. Would be great to see a prototype if they have one available.

[baconbrain]

2 hours ago, TimF said:

Thanks, running without anything attached same issue. 

Hi Tim,

 

Could you explain in a bit more detail what the sound is, or what it sounds like? My Asus 590 board made intermittent noises like when a hard drive is acessed, but I had no hard drives installed. Turned out to be coil whine.

[baconbrain]

12 minutes ago, TimF said:

It’s like a high pitch noise that goes between two tones rapidly. 

Try deactivating C-States in bios. That helped in my case.

[baconbrain]

@Nenon Drool! 🤤

 

Given the size of the case in relation to the mobo pictured, it looks massive!

 

Thanks for sharing and really looking forward to more details.

[baconbrain]

10 hours ago, Nenon said:

 

It really depends on how good your system is. If you bring the two servers to one of the best systems in the world, every experienced listener will prefer the Extreme. If you bring it to a mid-level system, the DIY server is so good that most likely would be limited in performance by other components in the system. And in this case the Extreme will still be better but by a very little bit. So, in one system the DIY server may be 60% of the Extreme, and in another it can be 95%. 

 

 

@Nenon Thanks for the comparison and appreciate your statement above. For me personally, the quality and relation of the overall system is something that I tend to lose a bit of sight on when pursuing digital audio nirvana with a DIY Server build …

 

 

[baconbrain]

On 6/2/2022 at 1:31 AM, Nenon said:

I've heard that the Taiko DIY chassis is ready. I should be getting some photos and details to post soon. 

Initial feedback is that it looks great but it's not cheap to manufacture. Keep you posted! 

 

Fantastic news, with all the noise around the limited availability and high cost of materials, I had the impression that Taiko Audio was going to sandbag it. Looking forward to more details.

[baconbrain]

On 6/23/2022 at 8:30 PM, ciccio1112 said:

Hi friends. my Taiko Do it yourself is being born.  I wanted to ask everything for Windows LTSC 2019 as per project by Nenon which are the best optimizations to do and the software to install, to make the best of the best.  Thank you.

@ciccio1112

 

Nice looking build. I am curious as to what your CPU operating temperature is?

 

Do you think that the heatpipes might be more efficient if they were mounted to the chassis heatsink slightly above the CPU?

 

Also would be curious to know who was your source for the RAM? (if you don’t mind sharing)

 

Thx

[baconbrain]

28 minutes ago, drjimwillie said:

Last night I arrived home late after being away for a family matter. The Taiko DIY chassis had been delivered early. My wife asked me what Crazy stereo stuff had I ordered that came in this big heavy box. I told her it was an empty case for a computer, she looked at me like I had two heads. When I went to pick up the box I understood why she had a hard time believing me. The box was very heavy. I went and got my scale, The box weighs 45 pounds.😳

I did not get a chance to open it. 
 

this is going to be a long term project for me because I am hip deep in other projects. 
at any time in the future if someone who has built or is working on building a DIY Sage computer and graduates to the genuine Extreme, I am looking to purchase the Sage motherboard, CPUs and RAM. Please send me a PM. 

Thank you 

Will

 

My 45 pound puzzle arrived today 🙃 …

 

 

[baconbrain]

Started putting the puzzle together today. It took me about 2 - 3 hours to build. Here are a few pics to give you an idea of the process. Don’t be fooled by the lighting, the chassis is completely flat black in color.

 

 

[baconbrain]

On 7/16/2022 at 2:46 AM, JJSim said:

 

Any 288 pin DDR4 ECC RDIMM/LRDIMM should work. Max frequency supported by that motherboard is 2933Mhz. Frequency is further dictated by the CPU; in the case of the Xeon 4210 it's limited to 2400Mhz. Memory refresh rate can be adjusted in BIOS.

 

Apacer has part # 78.D1GMP.4010B that would work with the Xeon 4210. Note that it is not the wide temp version that is more desirable. Samsung also has a good selection of server memory.

 

Curious as to where one can find the details regarding the cpu / memory frequency limitations. Do you have a specific reference?

 

Update: Nevermind, I found the information in the Intel CPU Specifications. 🤭

[baconbrain]

4 hours ago, Johnseye said:

Has anyone who purchased a Taiko case run into any issues putting it together?  It appears my L bracket with the threaded holes for the backplate was machined with those holes on the wrong side.  It would be surprising if only one has an issue like that.  I'm hoping it's something I did wrong but I believe I have the front plate and two heatsink sides attached to the bottom correctly.

Yes, I also had issues with the same L-Bracket. I waited to attach the L Bracket until after attaching the heat sink and back plate to the base and then somehow got it to fit. I contacted Taiko and they were more than willing to send a replacement L Bracket if I so desired. Good Luck.

[baconbrain]

Next challenge with my Taiko DIY Case appears to be that the pre-drilled and threaded holes in the base plate for mounting the Taiko DC-ATX are to close to the Asus WS C621e Sage Mainboard. Here a picture showing the overlap of the DC-ATX when aligned with the mounting holes:

 

 

Given that I my ARC 6 Power Supply is external, I will not need all the space within the case so I can mount the DC-ATX flush with the baseplate using just 2 of the 4 mounting holes. Which now looks like this:

 

 

Needless to say, I am wondering how Taiko can oversee something like this?

 

I realize that all new products have teething problems but given that this is now the third issue with the chassis there seems to be a certain lack of quality control on the Taiko side. Certainly not ideal for a product at this price point.

 

Would be curious to know if others encounter this issue or if I was just unlucky enough to get the bad apple of the bunch.  

[baconbrain]

1 hour ago, bit01 said:

@baconbrainI do not have the same hardware but looking at the DC ATX the holes do not look symmetrically centered on the board (could be an optical illusion?) I was wondering if you have tried it with the connector side against the MB? Worst case you can drill some holes? 

 

PS -seem symmetrical when I zoom in

 

Yes, tried both ways but there was still overlap. Also ensured that the mobo was mounted correctly using the Taiko provided stand-offs but unfortunately no difference.

[baconbrain]

59 minutes ago, JayM said:

 

 

First of all our apologies on behalf of the entire team here at Taiko Audio!

 

Regarding the L-brackets, so far we've in total been contacted by 4 people who had issues fitting the L-brackets. By far, most brackets were produced correctly. However due to human error, some brackets had been placed in the wrong position in the CNC mill which caused the wrong holes to be threaded. In the next DIY batch we've changed the design so that this can't happen again they will only fit one way. The people who were affected by an incorrect L bracket will be provided with a correct one. One person offered to fix it himself and asked us not to ship a bracket.

 

On the bottom-plate issue; As soon as Baconbrain contacted me by email (same issue as post above), I spoke with our design and production team what could have happened, because this is obviously substandard in terms of quality and the service we want to offer everyone. Here is a quick recap what happened:

 

We did physically test a DIY chassis here at the factory, with the same motherboard and our own ATX. It all fitted together brilliantly, however one of the the motherboards we used came with a shield back plate on which foam was attached (normally we don't have that). Because of the extra thickness of the foam the backplate of the DIY chassis would come under a little stress and bend ever so slightly. With a shield back plate (no foam) everything fitted perfectly. To make sure that all motherboards - including the ones with a foam covered shield back plate - would fit. Our design team moved all threads for the bolts on which the components - such as the different kind of motherboards - are connected 2mm to the front. This is where our mistake was made; our design team thought SolidWorks was moving all threads for all the bolts 2mm to the front but the ones for the ATX were apparently not selected properly. Originally there was 1mm between the sides of the ATX and the motherboard, and because only the motherboard has been moved 2mm, there is exactly 1mm overlap.

 

Today, as soon as we figured out what went wrong - especially since we test fitted everything here in the factory months ago - we started working on a solution. We already started production of a copper adaptor plate to be fitted between the ATX and bottom plate of the chassis. We will continue to work on these adapter plates tomorrow, and are hopefully able to ship these to everyone who ordered a DIY chassis - in the first batch - tomorrow afternoon. At the very latest these will be shipped out on Monday!

 

We once more sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused by the situation as described above.

 

 

@JayMBravo for the prompt response! My confidence has been restored.  

[baconbrain]

Quick question for those of you with a Taiko DIY Chassis.

 

Does one not use the Asus supplied CPU carrier clip when installing the Xeon CPU for the Sage MB together with the Taiko CPU Cooling Block?

 

Thx!

[baconbrain]

@Nenon Any idea as to when we can expect this:

 

 

 

[baconbrain]

7 hours ago, ASRMichael said:

Has anyone completed their Taiko diy build yet? (Taiko case). If so would you share pictures? 

 

Mine is still work in progress. With a few other things also going on in parallel, will probably need another week or two.

[baconbrain]

12 hours ago, Exocer said:

Very cool. Which ram (if any) did you go with?

 

APACER D51.23184S.001
DDR4 ECC REG DIMM 2666-19 512x72 4GB x 12

[baconbrain]

1 hour ago, MarcelNL said:

I'm running into a bit of an issue here, I switched off the server and LPSU for vacation and to aviud generating additional heat in the house during the heatwave.

 

Now powering it back on does not work, getting error messages from the MB but the strangest thing is that the LPSU shows 36V withoud load yet once I switch on the MB the voltage drops to 19 or so Volts, booting does not complete (which probably figures on 19V)....on the Taiko ATX a green led in the center is blinking, not having any more info than what is on the web makes trouble shooting near impossible....will see if I have a bog standard ATX lying around to try differentiate between the MB (or CPU) or the ATX/ LPSU.....damn... 

 

edit; additional observation: the voltage without load drops pretty fast without the ATX connected, where it used to stay at 35V for hours it now drops to 3V within a minute....that would IMO point at the LPSU (the Saligny power?

I'm hesitant to drop in the Taiko rectifier at this point....

 

Ideas anyone? 

 

The active rectifier on my ULPS died about 8 weeks ago which resulted in 0 voltage output...

 

I am certainly no expert but my guess would be the the problem lies within the ULPS.

[baconbrain]

6 hours ago, JayM said:

 

Unfortunately we are not always available to answer straight away. In case of technical questions like yours I really have to talk with people here at Taiko (in this case Emile), because I don't want to provide some generic answer but actually give you a response that might be useful. Also to be 100% honest Emile simply does not have the time (he wants to, believe me...) to answer every technical question regarding DIY components. This is because there are many questions related to Taiko Audio products like the SGM Extreme and other new developments that simply have to be given priority. 

 

Emile looked at the graphs and components you provided and he'd suggest "in your case to use the parallel connection option on your chokes and perhaps get a higher secondary resistance transformer like the Noratel we‘ve purchased for this project with 22/22/440 capacitance values. Contact us and we can work something out on exchanging your dc-dc atx combined with a Noratel transformer  and/or additional caps."

 

Hopefully this helps you out:)

 

@MarcelNL Since I lack the technical knowledge, perhaps you can help me to understand where the problem lies. Is it the ULPS or the dc-atx? Thx!

[baconbrain]

13 minutes ago, MarcelNL said:

the problem is the dead DC ATX...the ULPS is alive

and what was the cause of death?

[baconbrain]

Given that some of you have been requesting pictures of DIY chassis builds, I thought that I would share a few pictures with you showing where I'm currently at with the project:

Although this is still work in progress, I think the components shown in the build give you an idea of which direction I'm taking this. Namely, trying to stay as close as possible to the Taiko Audio blueprint.

 

Here a list of the hardware currently installed:

a) Taiko Audio DC-ATX converter

b) FIS Audio Cabling

c) Asus c621e Sage Workstation Mainboard

d) Dual Xeon 4210 Cpu’s

e) Twelve sticks of 4 GB Apacer ECC Ram

f) Two Asus Hyper M.2 Gen 4 Expansion Cards with 24 TB of M.2 storage in total

g) One Startech Optical NIC

h) One JCat XE USB controller

i) One custom built external ULPS

 

Things still wanting to try:

I have a Solarflare 10 GB NIC that I want to play around with and of course the Taiko Audio USB controller if and when it becomes available to the DIY community. Also considering bringing the ULPS inside the chassis with slightly higher specs.

 

Lessons learned:

Heat pipe bending - this was my first attempt at it and I had to go through 16 of them to finally get it right. I have some schematics available including the bend lengths and degrees. Just let me know per PM if you are interested.

 

Overall chassis build impression and things (imo) that could be improved:

No doubt about it, the chassis is rock solid and looks amazing.  You could probably drop it from 1 meter in height and it would survive. The flooring which you dropped it on would not. It is extremely well machined and nothing flexs or wobbles. Two small things which I feel could be improved are:

1) The plate used to secure the PCIe cards is adequate when using a card which physically sits in a slot but lacks when using slot covers or connectors (such as the MB VGA connector) with no PCIe Card attached. It would be helpful if Taiko could come up with a better solution going forward.

2) Perhaps one could pre-drill a few holes in the left (when facing the chassis front) heatsink. There is a lot of heat absorbing real estate which is currently not used. Not a major issue but would be a nice touch.

 

Hope this helps.

 

[baconbrain]

5 hours ago, SK8 said:

I started working on my DIY PC chassis for a couple of months now, my objective is to put C621E and Nenon V3 ULPS in the same box. I learned Adobe Fusion 360 and tried a few CNC small factories in China. The quality of their output is not at a high standard, but they can accept my 3D drawings and produce the metal works in a week time at reasonable costs. Here are some of the pictures of my work in progress. I will put in more copper walls and Permali wood to support the big capacitors and chokes.

 

 

 

Really like the look of the side elements, excellent work!

[baconbrain]

@Toymanmark Looking at the picture of your server build, I must admit that I am quite envious of how well you managed to fit the ps components into the case and overall design. Excellent job!

[baconbrain]

On 12/22/2022 at 7:01 AM, Nenon said:

 

 

There is also a downside to using an external LPS - you are mixing up multiple grounds, and that may have some side effects. 

 

 

Do ground loops remain an issue when powerng both LPS‘s from the same outlet?