Article: CAPS Twenty | Part Two

[Jud]

13 hours ago, EdmontonCanuck said:

 

It's true that you can achieve a fairly quiet air cooled setup with proper selection of fans, etc, but generally speaking, liquid cooling is generally regarded as quieter. Under high loads, you typically need to be moving a lot of air with lots of fans, and water is much more efficient at transferring heat than air. YMMV.

 

What you do with water cooling is use the water (which as you say is much better at heat transfer than air) to move the heat to a radiator away from the sensitive CPU circuitry, where multiple large relatively slow moving fans can get rid of it to the outside environment. It's just not possible to efficiently get as much air movement with fans moving as slowly packed in close to the CPU, so with air cooling the CPU tends to run hotter and the fans tend to run faster and louder.

[Jud]

Thank you Chris, I'm very appreciative you did this much work on a beautiful machine, giving the rest of us lots of ideas to play with. The ways I would think of to riff on this for my own preferences:

 

- Yes, definitely dual boot with Linux. That's where I prefer to run HQPlayer, on a lightweight Linux OS like Lubuntu, with a low latency kernel installed. It has a GUI, so you can run Roon if you like. I personally feel it's much easier to get rid of stuff you don't need without causing problems in Linux, and in one of the lightweight distributions there's less to get rid of in the first place. Unlike Windows, everything in the OS is open to you (of course that's an advantage and disadvantage, but if you really screw things up you can blow everything away and start over fresh). Then Windows is available for Audirvana, which like HQPlayer has some filter and modulator flexibility, allows sending DSD512 to the DAC, and doesn't require nearly as much horsepower as HQP.

 

- I would save on the case and the water cooling personally. They're gorgeous and very classy, but my tastes run to "open look" cases, and less expensive water cooling that also works well. I don't need silence because my server's in a different room than the main system. I could stay with my ancient but still versatile and reliable Antec Lanboy ( https://www.amazon.com/Antec-Lanboy-Air-Computer-Modular/dp/B003WMX3SY - out of production and the looks aren't contemporary, but very easy to work with ), or I could go with something like one of the open look Thermaltake cases pictured below.

 

- What to do with that money? I'd opt for the ASUS Maximus XII Extreme mobo, which solves the 10G Ethernet problem ( https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-MAXIMUS-XII-EXTREME ). And maybe I'd be a pig and go for *two* RTX 2080 Ti cards in SLI mode (depending on availability). Since I'd be using this computer for more than playing music, I'd also go for very fast storage and try to strike a nice balance between memory speed and latency. I've been happy with Samsung storage and G. Skill memory (lower cost since with lower latency I don't need ultimate speed, and makes pretty LED colors in an open case), though Optane is very tempting for both if I wanted to max out the budget. And yep, I'd go for the i9-10900K, fast as blazes and to me not that hugely expensive.

 

Just some fun thoughts about what I might do, though by the time I get around to updating my Win-Lin desktop machine, all of this stuff will certainly be outdated.

 

 

[Jud]

6 hours ago, 4est said:

Whoa... Two 2080ti? What else are you looking to do with a box like that Jud?

 

Well, now that I'm set to retire in under a year, I could Bitcoin mine my way to bankruptcy! 😉

 

But actually it would be interesting/useful for convolution filters for room response purposes, Folding@Home, SETI, and other amateur science projects, or even playing games.

[Jud]

On 8/17/2020 at 10:35 AM, AudioDoctor said:

SO @Jud I am glad to see you talking about Linux here because I am building a CAPS myself at the moment and trying to decide if I can run Linux on it with my level of knowledge about it, nearly zero, if I will be able to easily transfer files to it over the network from my iMac, and control it remotely from the same computer. I did not know Lubuntu was a thing either, I had planned on Ubuntu just to make things easy on me. I do have and use Forklift, will I be able to continue using that to transfer files to the CAPS machine?

 

I have so many questions.

 

Howdy. 🙂 I'm pretty close to zero on Linux myself - just know how to do a couple specific things that I Google when something doesn't work. But somehow I manage to muddle through, so it can't be that hard. A little irritating once in a while when tutorials and guides assume a higher level of knowledge than you have. 

 

Network transfers: Linux is so network-oriented it's almost counter-intuitive, because stuff you need apps for on other OSs Linux has built-in, or nearly so. Just install Samba (might be called CIFS or something like that, depending on the distribution) and your Linux box should be findable from your Mac. You can use Forklift I imagine. I keep copies of my music files on drives attached to both my MacBook Pro and my Win/Lin desktop in sync using ChronoSync ( https://www.econtechnologies.com/chronosync/overview.html ), but I don't know if you'll need anything like that.