 Back in 2017, I built what at the time seemed to be essentially the fastest possible server for transcoding our massive Cineform raw export files, we're talking 50 to 70 gigabytes into H.264 MP4s that we could upload to YouTube. At the time, while it was a little janky, the performance was basically as good as I could get. Then, I went to upgrade it about a year ago, testing both a 5.1 GHz binned overclocked 9900K, as well as the limited run auction only 9990XE, a 14 core chip capable of 5 GHz on all cores, and honestly, the results were appalling. Neither of the two flagship CPUs were able to offer much more than a 10% improvement to our transcoding times, making it seem like we had sort of hit a wall. But, in that video, I did promise you guys a follow-up, building up that server in a sick custom water-cooled chassis, and we're gonna do that, but with a twist. Now that Ryzen 3000 series processors are out and matured a little bit, we're gonna take another crack at upgrading this machine. We're gonna test the top-of-the-line Ryzen against the top-of-the-line Intel to see who wins in a heavyweight encoding showdown. And what better way to do it than to retrofit our old Minecraft server chassis into a balling render server. As many of you know, the ultimate Minecraft server chassis was designed and fabbed with the help of Protocase, and was pretty purpose-built around holding two ITX motherboards. And I can assure you guys that, um, this Threadripper-sized socket is never coming to an ITX motherboard. Jake realized that by removing just one of our three sandwiched radiators in the front, though, along with some minor modifications to the motherboard hole layout, we could actually easily fit both a full-size motherboard and a compact GPU. Ooh! And that is something that we're gonna need to be able to run our CPU of choice, the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. This is AMD's second-from-the-top Ryzen 3rd Gen CPU with an astonishing 32 cores that, at least according to Puget Systems, trades blows with even their top dog 64-core 3990X, at least for Adobe Premiere Exports. And given the price difference, we're gonna stick with the 32-core variant, even if it means taking a few seconds longer on our renders. So, I've got the chassis here, I've got all the bits to put it together here, and off-camera over there. So, let's build a water-cooled server, shall we? Let's start by taking a look at the care package Jake sent over to me. We've got three 80-millimeter Noctua cooling fans in the front of our chassis here, along with this really sweet AlphaCool reservoir that's easy to fill. So you just fill it up through the top here, and easy to check your coolant levels with the handy-dandy little window in the front. And we've got a D5 pump wired into the back of it. We've got a Corsair fan and RGB lighting controller here. And then we've got another eight 80-millimeter fans between these two 80-millimeter AlphaCool sandwiched radiators. So between these three banks of fans, we're trying to draw air in from the front of the chassis, and then send it over the motherboard and out the back. And then most of the cooling is gonna be handled right here, because both our CPU and graphics card are going to be water-cooled. With that sorted out, it's time to throw in our motherboard. Now, you might have noticed that we actually did not bother to change up the back panel here to make room for our full-sized ATX I.O. And the reason for that is that, honestly speaking, it just doesn't matter. The only card we're going to install in this is a graphics card, and we're going to be using a PCI Express extension cable in order to do that. So we'll deal with that later. First, let's go ahead and get the motherboard screwed in. Our reasons for choosing the ROG Strix TRX40E Gaming are pretty straightforward. We wanted something that wasn't pseudo-EATX, so wider, because that would have interfered with our ability to mount our graphics card and our power supply. And we wanted something with two and a half gig ethernet built in, so that we wouldn't need to modify the chassis to put in a faster network card. Not that it really matters. I mean, nothing we're doing requires greater than gigabit transfer speeds anyway, but it's just kind of a nice to have. Well, I'm not sure if this is the way I would have preferred to have it done, but it seems like Jake intends for me to mount the graphics card with some VHB tape on these 3D printed spacers. There are screw holes here, which is curious, but we apparently will not be using them. Our intention had been to go with an RTX 2060 for this build, but it did not arrive in time. Thanks, COVID-19. So we've got this Zotac GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. Now, you might think, oh, well, not having RTX means you also don't have the new NVENC encoder, but that's okay. We're just using the CUDA cores on the GPU as opposed to the fixed function hardware encoder. So it really shouldn't matter as long as we have enough GPU performance, at least according to our findings on this topic. I guess that was two or three years ago. For our power supply, we actually downgraded in a certain sense compared to the Minecraft server that we built. This is Corsair's SF750, and it's a 750 rather than an 800 watt unit. But unlike those Silverstone units we used before, this has dual 8-pin EPS connectors, which both our AMD and Intel HDD platforms require. We're just gonna mount it fan side up so that it gets to suck in some of the air that's being blown over the system by these 80 mil cooling fans. And we're gonna go ahead and use the same mounting screws once again. To actually plug the power supply in though, we've got to go ahead and run this right angle power connector through the hole in the back of the chassis. Then we get our plug correctly installed on the outside. Just pull up the power supply, plug the right angle connector in, make sure the power supply is powered on, because we're not really gonna be able to get that switch later. Oh, naturally, no, it's not that hard to get it, nevermind. So we're gonna leave it off, because that's a little bit safer when you're still building the computer. And then we can go ahead and screw this down. To be very clear, guys, we know that this isn't server spec hardware, and I keep calling it a server. A server is more of a function, and it will be serving a server role, even if it's desktop or a workstation class hardware. Need to plug in USB for our fan controller. Then we're gonna run our SATA connector around the power supply here, which is sort of a weird cable management choice on the surface. But it allows us to plug just a basic SSD. There we go. In response to the onslaught of comments that I'm sure are coming over my double-sided tape drive mounting, there's nothing wrong with it. With a hard drive, yes. Bad idea. With an SSD, they're lightweight, there's no moving parts. It's fine. That leaves fixing up the water cooling tubes as my last task here. The outlet from our reservoir is this one over here, so we're gonna run that over to our graphics card, which is a non-direction sensitive block. So we're gonna go ahead and cut this off to size, and we're gonna be off to the races pretty quick here. Let's see if we can get this to work. That's what we're looking for. Move them bubbles through. Thank you. Thank you kindly. Wow, you actually, you set this up all like real nice for me and everything. It's got the file sitting there ready to just press encode. The only thing you didn't include was a SATA cable. I didn't include a SATA cable? What? It's okay, don't worry. Don't worry, I found a super stylish one. Check this out. Oh no. This is like, I did that to myself. That's so bad. Oh man. I think we should just leave it in there. Oh yeah, heck yeah. On my side, we've got Intel's flagship 1090 XE. That's an 18 core processor, along with a matching 1080 TI, the same OS and media encoder is ready to start this test. So you ready to lose? I mean, probably win. You're going down, you're going down, brah. You're going down. You're definitely probably going to win. All right, ready? Three, two, one. Go. So what is this? This is a Cineform to H.264 transcode? Yeah, so it's taking the raw output from one of our editor stations. So it's going to be like a 50, 60 gigabyte file and transcoding it to H.264 so we can actually upload it to YouTube. Our previous rendering server probably would have done this video in about 20 minutes, so. I think I'm going to be beating that time. My estimated time remaining is 10.26. How about you? I'm one minute into it. Estimated remaining time is 14. Oh, it's going down to 13, but I mean, it's Adobe, so it's all over the place. Yeah, fair enough. What's your RAM usage like? I'm at 16 gigs. Yeah, basically 16 gigs as well. CPU usage is somewhere between 60 to 70%. Wow. Mine's at like 45, 50. What about GPU? My GPU's kind of chilling. Bounces between 10 and 20%. Oh, I'm like pretty much always below 10. Interesting. Six to 9%. Okay, everyone quiet, quiet. Pick up Jake. Mine was too fast. It was too fast. I finished 15 seconds ago. What? Yeah, you heard me. I still have four minutes remaining. Yeah, you got wrecked then, didn't you? 12 minutes, 42 seconds. Ooh, for comparison, I'm at 14 minutes and there's still three minutes remaining. That's crazy. The funny thing is like, yeah, it's got, you know, whatever, 80% more cores, but its usage was so low. Like it must just also be more efficient at encoding on a per core basis. Well, here, let me connect to our existing one and see if it's even done yet. Cause I bet you it's not. Yeah, okay, so our existing server, which is running it right now, elapsed. So far it's been 18 and a half minutes and there's 30 seconds left. So it looks like about a 19 minute end code. And then this one should be about 17 minutes. So there was a little improvement going from the 7980XE to the 10980XE, but the 3970X just wipes the floor with them. That's really impressive. So thanks for watching guys. If you enjoy these kinds of server videos, maybe check out our recent storage server upgrade, deploying new Wannac. It was sort of a nightmare, but it was also a lot of fun.