ono3 - Pelican 1430 to S4 Portable VR Workstation

[kirin]

You mention in S4 Mini thread that you manage to burnout your HDPlex250 with the 970. Curious to learn how that happen as I am waiting to buy a new video card for my S4.

 

[lhl]

Due to cumulative/long-term overheating from excessive power draw I'd guess. It just stopped working one day and when I took apart the system, and when I started digging I saw that some of the wires had melted/overheated, and when I managed to pry the 4-pin out, it had melted/fused into the board. I've pushed the board pretty hard, being on the outside of the power envelope w/ lots of stress testing, marathon gaming, builds/compiles, VR stuff, a few trips, and a bunch of backpack mounting, and powering w/ direct 18-25V (via Lipo batteries), so it's been through some "stuff."

970 cards can easily draw 170-200W+ though, so if you plan on running your system hard, I'd strongly consider seeing how the 1060 is priced. (Nvidia is claiming GTX 980 level performance at 120W TDP)

 

[kirin]

Thanks for the insight! Was planning to get either a 1070/480 itx version but interesting to see how 1060 turns out. It might be different case for me as I mainly use it for general gaming. Thanks again.

 

[lhl]

Thanks for the insight! Was planning to get either a 1070/480 itx version but interesting to see how 1060 turns out. It might be different case for me as I mainly use it for general gaming. Thanks again.

NP, btw I linked to it in one of the other threads, but GamersNexus has some good total system power measurements - basically the 480 at stock clock has a <250W system power usage under load. The 1070 is probably OK too if you are using a lower power (35-65W) processor. It's interesting that while they are both rated at 150W TDP, the 1070 is pulling an extra 24W. There's also a bunch of people that have started playing w/ undervolting the 480. Interestingly, performance can actually increase and power usage can go down significantly (a german publication reported a 33W power usage reduction).

 

[iFreilicht]

Due to cumulative/long-term overheating from excessive power draw I'd guess. It just stopped working one day and when I took apart the system, and when I started digging I saw that some of the wires had melted/overheated, and when I managed to pry the 4-pin out, it had melted/fused into the board. I've pushed the board pretty hard, being on the outside of the power envelope w/ lots of stress testing, marathon gaming, builds/compiles, VR stuff, a few trips, and a bunch of backpack mounting, and powering w/ direct 18-25V (via Lipo batteries), so it's been through some "stuff."

970 cards can easily draw 170-200W+ though, so if you plan on running your system hard, I'd strongly consider seeing how the 1060 is priced. (Nvidia is claiming GTX 980 level performance at 120W TDP)

That sounds more like your cables were too thin, to be perfectly honest. So in that case it wasn't even the fault of the unit.

 

[lhl]

That sounds more like your cables were too thin, to be perfectly honest. So in that case it wasn't even the fault of the unit.

Not sure if it's any one component's "fault" since it was running out of spec a fair bit, but I'll note that when it finally kicked the bucket, the wires did not look shorted (it also died "in its sleep" so to speak, since it was in suspend mode overnight when it died). Here's how the board looked like:

The DCIN socket is well melted and I think those are resistors next to it, and those connections are well toasted as well.

I just plugged in a spare SFX power supply in for the day or two it took for a new HDPLEX to get Amazon Primed. Since then I've further undervolted/underclocked my i7-4790k (was running it at 4.0GHz/1.12V w/ turbo disabled and I'm now running it at 3.8GHz/0.98V w/ turbo disabled).

(I run my HDPLEX friction-fit directly against the front of the S4 case (no velcro) to maximize heat dissipation. Works well in the sense that the S4 will get quite toasty under load from the HDPLEX)