NFC S4 #74

[vluft]

This isn't gonna be a particularly interesting build, for the most part, at least right now, but I figure I might as well post it up anyway.

Parts:

• ASRock X99E-ITX/ac
• Xeon E5-2680 v4 more or less
  
• 2x Samsung 32gb DDR4-2133 RDIMMs (P/N M393A4K40BB0-CPB, can confirm they work fine with mobo if anyone else wanted to do a similar thing)
• HDPLEX HiFi 250W DC-ATX
  
• Dell DA330PM111 power brick
  
• PNY NVIDIA Quadro K1200 (why? no gaming on this rig, it's low power & small & it has 4 mini displayport outputs which means it could drive two of the Dell/HP/whatever comes out next with the same panel but maybe slightly better backlighting displays.)
  
• Samsung SM961 1TB stupid-fast PCI-E SSD. (When it ships. Someday. Probably September at this point. Oh well, I still have other stuff to do on it.)
• Dynatron T318 heatsink. (motherboard needs narrow-ilm, not many options)
• Fan from an Akasa Nero LX fan/heatsink combo. (It's 18mm which is the absolute max I could fit above the heatsink + it has better static pressure than any 15mm fans I found)

Things done so far:

• basic assembly and system testing
• CPU stress test to make sure cooling is ok. (Turned out pretty well! more details in the S4 thread but tl;dr is with CPU at 100% for an hour, max core temp is 63°, idle <30°, chipset 43°. I look forward to Tek Everything trying a 140WTDP cpu, I chickened out and went with this 120W one.)
• Made nice (well, y'know, it's my first try at this, go easy on me ) short power cables, tested them out. Could use some cable ties to clean them up a little.

Things still to be done:

• Maybe make a new cable for the DC in? Would only be doing it to color match, it's just about right length anyway. Probably skip this. Will at least tape it down around the border though.
• Make nice appropriately sized cable to connect to power button. (Anyone have a preferred source for the connectors used for front panel connections + the terminal thingies?)
• Install SSD when I get it, set up OS &c.
• Figure out installing a DAC + AMP or combined thing in all that spare space I have in the bottom.

Picture of the current state, sorry about the not-great quality:

Yeah, definitely gonna clean up that cable a bit. might just zip tie to the fan on both sides.

Ahh, that's much better:

So all that lovely extra space at the bottom... What I wanna do, I think, is figure out a nice USB DAC + headphone amp that I can shove in there. Can use the on-board USB headers for DAC, can power amp from the SATA or PCI header on the HDPLEX (need one that can reasonable accept 12V or less and close enough to be regulated, probably...), and I have a spare PCI slot on there that I can use for headphone jack (get a blank + a panel mount jack, drill hole, &c). http://www.amb.org/audio/gamma1.5/ is one option - small enough, all that, and combined DAC & amp that are all USB powered. The only major issue with the project as far as what I can do at home is, well, Only good place to put the volume pot is sticking out the front panel, and man do I really not want to ruin that beautiful bezel with attempting to drill it and not knowing wtf I'm doing. Might need to buy a second S4 as a backup . Anyway, that's a ways down the road, and I'd get everything else set up and working to my satisfaction before I even dreamed about trying that.

 

[Tek Everything]

Build is looking good so far. I used to have a K1200 as well... It's a great little card.

 

[aquelito]

Great GPU indeed ! I Only low profile single slot cooler with 48 mm mounting holes I know of. Going to use it to mod a 750 Ti.

Could you turn the HDPLEX unit upside-down to shorten the ATX cable even more ?

 

[vluft]

Could you turn the HDPLEX unit upside-down to shorten the ATX cable even more ?

I tried that initially, but that made things super-duper tight for the 24 pin & power in connectors, a bit beyond what I'd be comfortable with. Basically have to plug the cables into HDPLEX then do acrobatics to manage to wedge it in and I didn't want to go through that much effort if I wanted to swap something.

 

[vluft]

Power switch wired, DC -> HDPLEX cable sleeved.

Still waiting on that durn diddly SM961. October now, you say? Rest of it is good to go though, so just need to install the SSD when it arrives and ossify the thing.

Other than that, want to grab a spare of the wraparound bit so's to have a backup if I fuck up drilling it - might just grab another case from the next run.

 

[Josh | NFC]

What's your power draw? Cool build...you said it wasn't interesting but now I'm dying to know what you think of interesting!!!

 

[vluft]

Well, it's a little weird I guess in that I'm trying to shove a Xeon in it, and in that I don't really care about the video card for 3d purposes... But I'm not doing anything fancy yet. Peak power draw should be in the neighborhood of 265W or so with the SSD. I haven't actually measured. If I don't end up finding something that will work as far as internal dac & amp, I'll probably stick the upcoming HDPLEX however-many-watt (more than the 160, and a bit longer is all I remember) AC/DC in the empty space at the bottom and make the thing brickless. Or, heck, might do both, really get a bit compact in there.

 

[vluft]

gersh durn it. gonna be late November now before I get that SSD, looks like. Maybe all the Samsung SSD production capacity is going to the new (and depressing!) RMBPs. Wouldn't surprise me at all if so. Anyway, hey, maybe at this rate the new HDPLEX AC/DC adapter will be out by the time I have it.

Edit (Nov 10th): lolol and now they've just canceled further production/availability of the SM961. Switching to a 960 Pro instead, we'll see when I get that.

Edit (Nov 27th): Probably will ship on December 19th. Siiiigh. Guess I had it coming for ordering the new shit, huh.

Edit (Dec 6th): Got a refund on the backordered-and-now-with-no-ship-date version, picked up an SM961 off ebay for less than I had paid. Seller seems reliable enough, should ship today, time to finally get this puppy finished. Except now I have (developing) ideas for building a case, too...

 

[vluft]

So I got the SM961, which is as crazy fast as advertised, installed it, discovered I lost my screws to put the sidepanel back on, facepalmed, and ordered some new screws.

Anyway, installed an OS now and did more testing to stress out the CPU and see how well the cooling works – did Prime95 for 24 hours, no errors, average core temp (once it got up to temp) 57°C, max 69°, which I'm pretty happy with, considering, so if you want do do a build like this with a heavy-duty CPU and not so much on the GPU, well, you can probably make it work.

All that remains now is finishing setting up things on the software side, basically. Oh, and switching it to brickless with the new HDPLEX AC-DC internal unit when that comes out. And fitting an internal headphone app with a front panel jack... Further updates if and when those happen.

 

[vluft]

Y'know... Betcha I could fit a Schiit Fulla 2 (http://schiit.com/products/fulla-2) board in there easily enough... Ordered one for testing purposes. If I'm happy with audio and it looks like I could make it fit, would probably cut off end of preamp out (or just desolder it) as I wouldn't be using it, mount it so headphone out is going through bezel, then mount a pot on the bezel as well...

Fully USB powered, so can run it off the internal header just fine.

 

[jeshikat]

There's a Fulla 2 now?...

Oh, that Jotunheim looks neat...

Uh oh

must... resist... buying more audio gear...

 

[Josh | NFC]

That DAC is the Schiit.

 

[vluft]

There's a Fulla 2 now?...

Oh, that Jotunheim looks neat...

Uh oh

must... resist... buying more audio gear...

Yeah, they've been doing some great stuff – the Fulla 2 looks fantastic, Jotunheim, they're doing afforable 2-channel (Vidar coming soon), multibit (optionally) on the Modi...

I like Schiit a lot. They make all the audiophile wankery super affordable, and it sounds great too.

 

[vluft]

That DAC is the Schiit.

The most important thing on the new Fulla: yes, the USB device name still shows up as "I'm Fulla Schiit"

 

[MJVR1]

Schiit is an awesome company. Their no BS mentality it what I love about them.

About the integrating a fulla, that's probably not the brightest idea. There's a reason why Jason doesn't like the idea of combined dacs/amps. That's because EMI becomes a huge problem. On the these SKUs they sort of figured it out but removing the housing will expose the entire device to EMI which will affect sound quality. What's more, the inside of a pc is VERY noisy so that will aggravate the problem. Take that as you will though. Most people don't actually notice it much. For people like, it'll drive them crazy.

Sorry if i killed your excitement, just wanted to warn you beforhand.

 

[vluft]

Schiit is an awesome company. Their no BS mentality it what I love about them.

About the integrating a fulla, that's probably not the brightest idea. There's a reason why Jason doesn't like the idea of combined dacs/amps. That's because EMI becomes a huge problem. On the these SKUs they sort of figured it out but removing the housing will expose the entire device to EMI which will affect sound quality. What's more, the inside of a pc is VERY noisy so that will aggravate the problem. Take that as you will though. Most people don't actually notice it much. For people like, it'll drive them crazy.

Sorry if i killed your excitement, just wanted to warn you beforhand.

Yeah, I'm not an electrician at all and have no idea what I'm doing but I figured at least it's worth a try. Positionally, it'd be relatively far from what I'd think would be the noisy bits except for the GFX card. Plus if it does fit alright and there's too much EMI noise, well, could at least try wrapping it (probably not literally, just make a boxy thing around it) in copper mesh (insulated on the inside) and see if that's enough of a faraday cage.

ETA: and if that's not enough of a Faraday cage could do sheet steel sandwich thing, which would block more I think?

 

[ricochet]

Basic shielding (as you suggested) coupled with the already very open nature of the NFC S4 case might just work! Looking forward to hearing about the results. You might have to experiment with multiple positions and orientations with the Schiit to find the perfect least noise option. Good luck!

 

[EdZ]

I've always been a little wary of Schiit after the issue with the Asgard headphone amp dumping raw DC into drivers at power up/down, and that it took a bit of time between an initial denial that it was an issue for them to offer to retrofit protection relays to earlier models.

 

[vluft]

I've always been a little wary of Schiit after the issue with the Asgard headphone amp dumping raw DC into drivers at power up/down, and that it took a bit of time between an initial denial that it was an issue for them to offer to retrofit protection relays to earlier models.

I don't remember denial of an issue so much as an initial attitude of "uh if you turn it on while you have them plugged in that's your own dumbshit problem" which is also not great but understandable from old-school audio guys like Mike and Jason, imo. I've had a couple interactions with their support over the years and have found it pretty exceptionally good, fwiw.

 

[EdZ]

I don't remember denial of an issue so much as an initial attitude of "uh if you turn it on while you have them plugged in that's your own dumbshit problem" which is also not great but understandable from old-school audio guys like Mike and Jason, imo. I've had a couple interactions with their support over the years and have found it pretty exceptionally good, fwiw.

I went and dug up the original thread (wow, that's a blast from the past). Shiit initially claimed a 100-150mV transient, Someone else then tested theirs and confirmed it was an order of magnitude larger, and only then did Schiit actually test one of their own amps and confirm the fault. They handled it well by offering a recall/repair/replace service for free, but it's worrying that such an issue managed to reach production without someone popping a multimeter across the outputs in the first place.