 Wow! Was that a 10 gigabyte file transferring in just a few seconds? What if I told you it was between two separate machines? And then, what if I told you we did it for less than $100 worth of used parts off eBay and less than an hour of tweaking within Windows? Well it's true, and you could do it too! IbuyPower and MSI's new lineup of gaming laptops feature Intel 7th generation Core i7 processors. Check them out at the link below. Our journey began when I spotted a post on the Linus Tech Tips forum where a user was showing off a local networking setup that boasted speeds 3 to 4 times higher than the one that we used in our guide to 10xing your network speed on a budget. And at a lower price using second hand enterprise networking gear called InfiniBand. So I sprung into action, drafting an email to Jake that went something like Hey, this looks really cool, but I'm super busy, can you figure out what the junk is going on with this? And he was like, okay, this looks pretty simple. I order the cards in the post and a QSFP copper direct attach cable, plug them in and it's off to the races, right? Wrong! The Quad Data Rate or QDR 40 gigabit InfiniBand cards we got off eBay were made by Q-Logic, a company that was acquired by Intel who doesn't provide Windows drivers. And while showing these speeds on Linux would have been really cool, the majority of our audience runs Windows, so... Round 2, fight! We began with high hopes for the MHRH2A-XSR, even though we couldn't find it on Mellanox's website, only to have them dashed by an inaccurate product listing. The second one we bought is a double data rate card, and I've been informed that 20 gigabit transfer speeds are so last week. Lussi. Not to be dissuaded from spending my money by the first two unsuccessful attempts, Jake ordered a third pair of InfiniBand adapters, Mellanox MHQH19B-XTRs for 25 bucks each and a 5 meter or 15 foot QSFP copper direct attach cable for 30 bucks, putting our total cost at $80 and still under $150 for a much longer link with a 45 foot cable running you about $90 US dollars. The cards are PCI Express Gen 2 and should fit in any reasonably modern computer, so install. Then, in Windows Device Manager, you should see Mellanox ConnectX2-IPOIB adapter. If they don't show up, then install the WinOF Archive version 4.95, then update it to 5.10 for the most stable results. Theoretically, this will update your cards to the latest firmware, but if it didn't, we will have a blog post on the LTT forum that outlines the detailed steps for forcing this manually, as well as some other details about the process. Check it out below. With the cards recognized, we have functioning InfiniBand NICs, but no subnet manager, which assigns an ID to the NICs and creates a routing table based off that. So, effectively then, there's no way for them to receive or send anything. Since one of the most likely use cases for something like this would be a high speed SMB or iSCSI server and a preferred client somewhere else on the network, we opted to install OpenSM on the test bench representing our file server. Again, you can find the full details in the blog post. We're getting close to the end now. We need to assign IP addresses to our InfiniBand adapters, but since they can't be used to communicate with the other Ethernet and Wi-Fi devices on our network, we want to put them on a separate subnet and keep our normal Ethernet plugs plugged into the motherboard. So, if your home network is 192.168.0.something, then you could go with 192.168.1.something. Let's say 20 for our server and 21 for our game machine. Almost there. Accept the new network pop-up on both machines, run a quick ping test to make sure they can see each other, then to ensure that the higher speed link is used when transferring data between the two machines, adjust their priority by changing automatic metric to some number. We chose 20 for our onboard Ethernet and 10 for our InfiniBand. And bam! You should have a 40 gigabit link, though please note it'll show up as 32 gigabit due to 810 encoding. And all that's missing now is some kind of drive that can actually saturate that kind of a connection. Fortunately, we still have those 16 gig sticks of Dominator Platinum that we were supposed to send back to Corsair, but then our PR app left and didn't tell anybody, and our buds over at SoftPerfect hooked us up with their RAM disk software. Seven gigabytes per second, anybody? Unfortunately, on consumer versions of Windows, we didn't see quite the results we were hoping for. Latencies were still super low, which makes sense, since InfiniBand is an enterprise technology intended for storage area networks, but we capped out at about one gigabyte per second for our maximum bandwidth file transfer tests, similar to 10 gigabit Ethernet. So what gives? Well, the answer is RDMA. On Windows Server or Linux, we could expect much better. Perhaps a follow-up later? Let us know in the comments if you'd like to see that. Either way, we're pleased as punch with the results, because compared to 10 gigabit Ethernet, we do lose the interoperability with other Ethernet gear, but we gain the same transfer speeds as long as all we're looking for is point-to-point and a whole lot of money to put back into our wallets. So this is an interesting one we've got today. This is the TMA2 modular headphone system from III. It lets you create your own headphones, providing a vast range of interchangeable options through their configurator. You can change the headband, you can change the speaker units, you can change the earpads and even the cables, although that last one is sort of more normal. Everything else, though, is like freaking crazy. There's over a thousand different total combinations that you can build, depending on whether they're for everyday use, DJing, studio recording, or you want something that's really light and portable. And not just that, they can be taken back apart and recombined with add-on parts that you can get down the road if for whatever reason you want to change up the experience. So check out their configurator at the link in the video description and build your own today. So thanks for watching, guys. Dislike or like, get subscribed, maybe check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Also down there is our merch store where you can buy cool shirts and posters and all that kind of stuff, as well as our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, check out this latest video over on... Oh, actually, I don't know what videos we're featuring now, so check out a video. It'll show up or something.