Nenon Posted January 27, 2021 Share Posted January 27, 2021 4 hours ago, vhs said: Hi there, any news yet ? Just in case you have missed the news that Taiko is working on a case already: On 1/7/2021 at 5:05 PM, Nenon said: Here is the first draft of the DIY computer chassis by Taiko. It's big! Bigger than the Extreme chassis actually. Thick panels, high quality, no flimsy stuff... the thinnest panel is 6 mm. It can handle any motherboard. You can see the dual CPU Asus Sage motherboard fitted in the last photo. That is the biggest motherboard I've used. And there is so much space around it for a a power supply. Emile and I had a long discussion regarding the size of the chassis. It could be smaller. And that would be 20-30% cheaper. But this is DIY, and it would be excellent to have some extra space to work with inside the chassis. The cooling capabilities of this chassis would be extraordinary. That's another reason for the decision to make it so big. It should be able to properly cool down any consumer CPU with some headroom if we utilize both heatsinks. But even if you don't cool down crazy CPUs, keeping your CPU and everything inside the chassis a few degrees lower typically leads to better sound. There will be CPU coolers (at least for the Xeon CPUs and the SAGE motherboard) and heat pipes included. Perhaps for other CPUs in the future too. We can fit full height PCIe cards. That would be great for those of us who prefer PCIe based storage. We can fit one or more Asus Hyper M.2 cards with NVME drives inside. There will be an opening on the back that we can fit with a plate that has either a DC connector or a IEC inlet / fuse. There will also be ventilation holes on the bottom panel... these are not reflected on the pictures. An LED on the front panel and power button on the back. We would like to hear your comments. But don't ask about price. It's too early. Taiko is not doing this for profit. But good quality costs money, so don't expect it to be a couple hundred dollars. I had to buy 4 x HDPlex H5 cases to build my DIY coolers for those Xeon CPUs. That is a $1,200 expense plus a lot of work and not even close to this passive cooling solution. The main reason Emile is doing this is to enable the DIY community to build a proper dual CPU server, so we can explore new discoveries everyone would benefit from. Just like we did in the legendary Novel thread not so long ago. It's interesting how many current manufacturers were inspired or influenced by the Novel thread and used ideas from there! There was a time when DIY was ahead of the commercial sector. Also, I know there are a lot of opinions on what CPUs should be used, CUDA offloading and cooling, etc. etc. Let's stay focused on this project. This is not designed to be an universal audio / home theatre chassis like the Hdplex and Streacom cases that should be able to accomodate any computer. The purpose of this chassis is to go with a specific DIY recipe utilizing the dual CPU Asus SAGE motherboard for now. If we find something that sounds better, it can be tweaked in that direction. There is plenty of space inside for anything and plenty of cooling capacity. There is one particular question we are wondering about. For those who will be following this DIY recipe and building this computer - you are willing to pay 20-30% more for the extra space in a bigger chassis like this. There is of course plans to fill that space with a state of the art power supply. That's something that is still in the works and will be a part of the complete DIY recipe. It seems like there is a lot of excellent technology Taiko is willing to share with us. vhs 1 Industry disclosure: https://chicagohifi.com Dealer for: Taiko Audio, Conrad Johnson, Audio Mirror, and Sean Jacobs Link to comment
Nenon Posted January 29, 2021 Share Posted January 29, 2021 1 minute ago, rossb said: Is passive cooling really necessary? The fans on my Noctua NH-D15 are currently spinning at about 200rpm and are completely silent. It's not about the mechanical noise from the fan as much as vibration. If you are building a $10K server, you most likely have a very resolving system and can clearly hear the effects of different vibration treatment under the server. All these clocks and capacitors are super sensitive to vibrations that we can't even feel. Ask some hardcore headphone users - they use vibration treatment too, even though they don't have huge speakers blasting sound waves. Adding fans to a computer of that class is like buying an expensive telescope to watch the stars and using it from the car while driving on a dirty road. Sorry, I could not come up with a better example. In simple words, it's completely unacceptable. StreamFidelity 1 Industry disclosure: https://chicagohifi.com Dealer for: Taiko Audio, Conrad Johnson, Audio Mirror, and Sean Jacobs Link to comment
Popular Post Nenon Posted January 30, 2021 Popular Post Share Posted January 30, 2021 9 hours ago, rossb said: The processing power of the CPU in my experience has a far bigger impact on sound quality than a few fans. That is my experience as well. But with everything else equal removing the fan is another step up. There is also another factor - keeping the temperature lower. So a good active cooling solution that keeps the components cool might work better than a bad passive solution that can't keep up. It's the sum of all parts at the end. I currently use two 85W TDP CPUs in a HDPlex H5 chassis, one connected to each heatsink. I would say that is the limit of the Hdplex. The chassis from Taiko would be able to handle a lot more than that. The bottleneck in heat dissipation would actually be the heatpipes, not the coolers or the heatsinks. I am expecting to be able to passively cool down two 100-120W TDP CPUs, but that is to be determined. If the heatpipes were not a bottleneck, I would have said 200W+. I agree that there are many other things that make a bigger difference. But as I go through every detail on my music server and sort out all the things that make a bigger difference, there is a point I reach where replacing the active cooling with a good passive cooling is the next logical step. Once you get to that point it's a really nice improvement. In other words, don't take my comment out of context. When I said "If you are building a $10K server..." I implied that attention to every detail has been taken. $10K is a lot of money for a DIY server! Passive cooling is not the most important aspect, but at some point it becomes quite important factor, and easy to hear. That point is probably closer to $2K... at 5 times that price, quoting myself "it's completely unacceptable" to have fans. kyoya78, StreamFidelity, LTG2010 and 3 others 3 3 Industry disclosure: https://chicagohifi.com Dealer for: Taiko Audio, Conrad Johnson, Audio Mirror, and Sean Jacobs Link to comment
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