 Welcome to the ultimate distributed computing build log. We do tons of build logs and build guides that are mostly, not entirely, but mostly for people building gaming PCs. And trust me, this computer will rock games. This build log however will have a bit of a different tune to it. The idea of this build is for it to be a distributed computing powerhouse for Folding at Home and Boink. But before we get into the build itself, I'm sure some of you are wondering what Folding at Home and Boink even are. Both of these programs are largely trying to answer questions or solve various problems that are negatively affecting many people in the world today. Folding at Home is focusing on Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's and Parkinson's, amongst many other different forms of cancer. Boink also looks to research cures for various diseases, but has options for other projects as well, like discovering pulsars, working on mathematical proofs, and many, many more. These programs are able to work on these various interesting projects by distributing the workload amongst many users. Those users' computers are essentially donating their performance and their house's power to accomplish great things. This whole build will be about pushing the limits, and the CPU was no exception. The Core i7-5960x 8-core Extreme Edition processor from Intel is the best of the best of any enthusiast-grade chips available today. So I went with that. Both of these programs can run on basically any semi-modern desktop processor, but this is an ultimate build, so Extreme Edition it is. Now we could have fairly easily chosen any X99 motherboard, but when ASUS heard what we were planning, they wanted to step up. And in a rock-solid way, they did. The heart-touching ASUS Republic of Gamers Rampage 5 Extreme X99 motherboard is one hell of a hookup, and it fits this build in a multitude of ways. First up, it looks fantastic in a black and red aesthetic that will match the rest of the build. It has a sexy Republic of Gamers LED in the middle of the board, and a nice I.O. cover that will look great along with the black PCB that we've come to expect from Republic of Gamers boards. Second, and I guess arguably more important, is the board's stability. This board has quality components everywhere and wonderful copper-based heat pipes under those attractive heatsinks. It's one hell of a board. Is it overkill? Uh, yes, definitely. For our case, we'll be using the newly released Noctus 450, which appears to be a wicked mix between the H440 and the NZXT Phantom line of cases. The outer aesthetic of this case uses a mixture of aggressive lines, solid panels, and meshing to create a performance look. It also features underglow lighting, which you would normally have to mod in yourself. A great touch. Now, is probably a good time to point out that there are two different versions of the Noctus 450. One in black and red that I chose, and another in blue and white if you want a different color palette than I did. Venturing through the trapezium or trapezoid side panel, we reveal what appears to be the inside of an H440. This is a Noctus series case, not a Hush series case. So rather than including noise dampening foam, as they did with the H440, they added in a treat for the more raw performance minded folks out there by upgrading the fan controller to an awesome PWM controlled module. This is where things started to get really fun. I couldn't exactly pass up ASUS on their awesome motherboard offer, but as you can probably tell, this is an ITX, MATX, and ATX case. And the board is definitely extended ATX. Back to the drawing board, you say? No. I don't like this work. Here at Landis Media Group, finding solutions to problems that most people would simply avoid entirely is a daily occurrence. With barely a second thought, I decided to just go for it. The case does angle up on the right side before the board ends, but not actually enough to make it actually bend. So full speed ahead. The board does touch the rubber grommets and ultimately cover them up, which is a shame because they definitely would come in handy for cable management, but not the end of the world because I can just route my cables through the nicely spaced drive cages. For cooling, I installed the 2x140mm NZXT Kraken X61. The N450 can fit up to 3x120mm coolers or a 2x140mm cooler. Now I know the white fans that come with the X61 kind of hurt the overall aesthetic, but never fear. They will be hidden by the top panel once installed. The tubing for the cooler, conflicting with the shroud on the motherboard's I.O., did cause a bit of a tight fit, but never fear. Again, the install worked out just fine without the need for any modifications. Folding it home and boink don't really seem to care much about what RAM they have, so we didn't go quite to the overkill level in this area. If we were building this PC solely for the purpose of distributed computing, even 8GB of RAM would have been enough, but we went with 16GB of HyperX Fury DDR4 modules, which should have us covered for a wider range of tasks. For the power supply, NZXT hooked us up again with a 1200W HALE90V2, which will ensure that we won't run out of power, even under pretty heavy load. The power supply slides into the back of the case after being attached to the thumbscrew based support bracket, similar to how you install a power supply on an H440. Again, the power supply is white, which doesn't quite go with our theme aesthetic, but it hides under the fantastic included basement in the case, so it's not really a big deal. Since folding and boink really don't need much in the way of storage capacity or speed, it's common for these machines dedicated to these tasks to have fairly non-impressive storage solutions. We went with a solution that would hold many a gamer's library, two of these 960GB SSDs from Kingston that Linus had on hand for an upcoming server project that he's working on. If you're building a dedicated rig for folding or boink, don't worry about your drives so much, but if you do plan on doing other things with your computer like gaming, or using it as a workstation PC, a fast system drive is awesome. Now the graphics cards for this system are really fun. ASUS hooked us up again with a beast Matrix 290X, which features some sick looking black heatpipes and will just generally look great amongst all the other black and red components in this build, while doing extremely well for our distributed computing projects. Next up is the Titan X. Now I know, I know, obviously I can't link these two together, but Boink has different projects that work for either CUDA on the Nvidia side or CAL on the AMD side. And while the rest of the build is so insanely overkill, it felt like a shame to limit to one or the other, so I said to myself, why not both? Now the Titan X is sure to crush through projects as well, but it has that crazy green on the side which just will not do. While thinking of ways to fix this problem in a simple and slightly ridiculous way, as is the Linus Media Group style, I noticed some of Brandon's gaffers tape was a similar color to the black on the Titan X. After cutting a strip to size and trying to get the angles right, it looked pretty cool, but not quite 100% there. I took some of the black spray paint that Linus had left over from a previous mod that Brandon had suggested to me and decided to use the gaffers tape like reverse painter's tape, painting the gaffers tape to be black instead of gray and then placed it back on the card. I definitely wouldn't say that it's a perfect solution, but honestly for an inexpensive and easy to implement solution, it looks really good and isn't even necessarily recognizable if you aren't looking for it. Then all that was left was just to plug everything in that wasn't already plugged in and quickly touch up the cable management mostly by shoving everything I could into the basement compartment and then strapping down whatever I couldn't shove into there with some of the many zip tie loops on the back of the motherboard tray. Now we're up and running. I installed Windows really quick on our RAID Zero, the machine looks beautiful and it's time to get started contributing to some projects. I'd like to note that I didn't overclock anything on the system. This may change however, and I don't recommend anything against overclocking, especially when you're contributing to projects like folding at home and boink, but it is also very important to note that you should be careful when setting up a system like this as I plan to run this setup full bore 24-7. Sometimes when people verify overclocks, they're fairly lazy about it and will often test things for 10 or 30 minutes. If you plan to have a setup like this, I would be as thorough as possible. Verify that overclock for at least 24 hours. First up we have folding at home, which happens to be the biggest distributed computing team for Linus Tech Tips. Currently sitting in 25th place overall for points, 4th place for current active users, and has amassed over 3,500 users in just over two years. Bravo guys, bravo. We are one of the fastest growing folding teams in the world and it's damn impressive. Now to setup folding at home in a simple and quite easy way, simply download your respective installer, install it by spamming next, and away you go. The problem with this however is that there may be some residual issues from not configuring it properly. As you can see with my 290X and Titan X, they're happily running away doing their thing. But on Cam, on the left hand side, you can see that our 290X for example is running at about high 80% in terms of load and coming in at about 83 degrees Celsius. That seems pretty good but it's not as fast as the card can go and I expect more out of it than that. But the issues do not stop there. Our 5960X has failed its work order and is not producing any results currently, which is a huge loss. To optimize folding at home, you require some configuration. And yes you can just change the folding power slider that will likely be enough, but you really need to optimize things. I highly suggest you check out the Linus Tech Tips forums for tips, huh, and details on how to set up folding at home in an optimal manner. And the same is true with Boink. Folding at home will just pick protein folding projects for you. With Boink you need to sign up for projects on your own and then get work orders from those specific projects. Due to the sheer amount of things you can do in Boink, there's a lot of different configuration tips so again, check them out on the forum. After getting this machine fully optimized, I'll let it run folding at home for a while before shifting over to Boink and optimizing again. Because these projects are better seen over time, I would suggest that you check out the progress links in the description to see just how my machine and the team as a whole are doing. There are parts in here that need to go into future projects so unfortunately this machine won't be running forever, but I'll try to get some serious work done with it while I can. Thanks for watching the Ultimate Distributed Computing Build Blog. I hope you enjoy some of the glam of this awesome looking black and red disease and various world problem fighting machine. As always, thanks to everyone involved, especially our title sponsor NZXT for making this build possible. Be sure to check out the pricing and discussion thread in the link in the video description if you're interested in where you can pick up the Noctis 450 case, as well as all the other parts we used in this build. Thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time.