 That feeling when a package that you ordered on eBay or whatever finally arrives, you tear it open, take out the packing material, and it's that last part you need to build a machine that you've been waiting forever to build. This is my new motherboard for the DIY PF Sense router machine, and hopefully the one that's going to survive. Drop a like on the video if you like that feeling as well, and drop a dislike if you hate seeing me kill hardware. Corsair RMI series power supplies feature premium components for great performance with very low noise. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. Shhh, be respectful. This is a graveyard. The graveyard of motherboards. So here is everything for the DIY PF Sense router including my two dead S1200KP Intel server boards. Let's see if third time really is a charm. Now in the comments under part one of this video, there's a lot of people criticizing the choices that I've made in terms of the hardware for this machine, with criticism number one being, Linus, why didn't you just buy a cheap 1U machine on eBay and use that, with my response being, well, because that's not a very interesting video, me sitting at my computer clicking buy. And number two, with people saying how overkill it is that I'm using a Xeon for a router. I know, we already had it. I didn't run out and buy it to make this video. Now with that said, I have bought a couple motherboards now, but that is because we are already many hours of 3D printing into creating some custom hardware in order to make this project work. And could we have found something that would fit together better out of the box? Yes, of course we could. But that's not fun. And we are going to start by testing this motherboard outside of the system to find out if it works at all, before we introduce some of the variables that might end up killing it. So we'll start with CPU installation. CPU, known good. I actually ran it right before I started up this build log in the first place and it was fine. RAM, very unlikely that's killing our motherboard. It's actually on the validated list, not to mention that it's Kingston RAM. And the last time Kingston produced RAM that killed anything was, oh, I don't know, never. I got a lot of people saying that it's my cooler and backplate that are killing the board, to which I would reply, did you even watch? Like, did you even watch the video? The entire backplate is covered in electrical tape. That is not what happened. But for the haters, I'm going to go and I'm going to grab a stock heat sink to test the board with first. For extra safety, I'm going to try a standard desktop power supply next. Now, I don't think the problem is my power supply. What I think the problem is, is someone that almost nobody in the comments actually picked up on. And that is this four-pin connector that comes off of the OneU power supply that I plugged into a fan header on the motherboard that I checked with a multimeter later and which appeared to be supplying rather than requiring power. No power to my mouse and keyboard. Why don't we start with different RAM and see how it goes from there. Now, it's always possible when a motherboard dies that it can take other hardware with it. And I'm really hoping that it didn't kill our Xeon CPU. Let's try a different CPU. So now I've got a 3570K from the CPU pile to try. The weird thing is with the other chip, I wasn't getting any beep codes and it was warming up. It was actually getting power. Okay, this time it's failing post. New plan, it's quite possible that even though they're on the same socket, this motherboard doesn't actually support the 3000 series processors. So I grabbed a 2600 and we're going to take this baby for a spin. No power to the peripheral still. I'm starting to think we've got a dead board on our hands here. I can try a different stick of memory. Oh, oh, hello. So she is a little picky on the memory compatibility, but we have a post. This is good news. Now let's try our Xeon chip with that RAM and see how that goes. I think we may have not only killed our board, but also killed our CPU and RAM. So we're going to the 2600 and the full height RAM, even though that's not really going to work for the final build. I'm going to give it a shot. First, I'm going to try the 3570K to see if our BIOS update at the very least might have given us more options for newer generation processors to work in this board. So that's the end of that chapter. Now let's try the original Xeon. Hey, all right. The RAM works, but the CPU is dead, which means I can build today and change out the CPU if I decide to do that at all. Remember, Xeon for ECC support, so we're not actually taking advantage of the ECC memory. So if I decide to change out the CPU, I can do that at another time. All right, let's forge ahead then. Let me give you guys a little lesson on electronics. A piece of plastic shroud over top of a speaker does not affect the functionality, as I will prove right now. So as you can see, just like on the previous two attempts, I have only removed the top of the plastic. Let's go power it on. Oh, what's that? Oh, oh, cutting down. Oh, cutting down the speaker doesn't do anything because why would it? I could rip the speaker right off and it wouldn't do anything. The speaker just wouldn't work. Huh, how about that? The number of people educating me about the dangers of a metal backplate, fairly high. I don't know if you guys know this, but the manufacturer of the CPU heatsink is also aware of the dangers of metal backplates, and the backplate actually had a non-conductive coating on it. So yeah, that was a thing. But just in case I had damaged that non-conductive coating, I did, there we go, we've got CPU contact, I did cover it in electrician's tape last time around. The internet was right, I think the backplate heatsink mount did kill the board because we are now down to, well, up to three dead boards, but not for the reason that they think it did because the backplate's anti-conductive coating was not penetrated. I think the reason it died was actually from too much mounting pressure. But there's good news and we are going ahead with the project because I've discovered that my Z87N Wi-Fi motherboard happens to be almost identically laid out to the Intel board that we were using before. So I've grabbed a different Xeon and we are just going to build a router today, damn it, no matter what, because our gigabit internet upgrade is already done. So here we go. Now for my next trick, I'm going to take my test bench and physically move it into the case. All right, power supply still works. Very good. We are in good shape, friends, we are in good shape. Okay, there's still one more thing to go wrong actually. Now, I'm not going to use the same PCI-E 1X riser that I was using before. If I can get away with it because my 16X riser that I ordered on eBay actually has finally arrived. So we should be able to get full 4X performance out of this card assuming that this solution works at all. So now we are going to go almost all the way and boot into the OS and see if our network card is recognized. Let's pull this back off. Oh, I think that was plugged in kind of funny, maybe that was the issue. All right, that was the issue. I just needed to receipt that puppy. And I really don't like that this keeps going load optimized defaults then boot. You stop that, what's your deal? So it actually blue screened even without our network card in there, which leads me to believe maybe it's something else. My Windows 7 bench drive could be just kind of flaky right now. So let's try my Windows 8 test drive. So we're booted into the Windows 8 drive, so we're going to try our network card again. If anyone from Microsoft is watching, why the actual ****? If I start typing my password immediately on that screen and I only have a single user account on the machine, does it not just log me in? There's always like a quarter of a second delay and it misses the first character or two. Fix that. All of our network ports are showing up. It is time to actually install it inside the machine. So what I'm doing is I'm actually trying to jam enough wires through this gap that even if I accidentally press down on this tab while I close it, it actually can't open because that will release my memory modules. Just for doing some quick testing here. I'm going to put this baby up here. Oh, we're close. I can smell it. Now this is a cool thing about this case. You can actually install your expansion card either way, and I think we may be better served by doing it this way this time. So if I press on these, are they going to move? Nope. It's finally here. Everything is working, which leads us at last to the whole point the thing I wanted to test with this video, our custom cooling shroud for our heatsink. We need to test two different scenarios. Number one, how does it perform with only these high RPM fans pulling air from the front and blowing it out the back of the chassis towards our aligned CPU heatsink? And in order to give this config the best fighting chance, we're actually going to try it a couple of different ways. Because you can see the way the chassis is meant to channel airflow is in the front slash top a little bit, and then out these ventilation holes at the back. So we can actually try it both with the whole thing open and with everything around the CPU heatsink itself actually blocked off so that we're getting more airflow through the fins of the heatsink. But let's try it completely open first. So our idle temps actually look pretty good sitting in the 35 to 40 degree range. So for the sake of this video, I think we're going to use the CPU package temperature here. All right, let's start a stress test and see what happens to that. Well, 65, still climbing. So what are our hottest cores sitting at around 60 degrees with the package sitting at 63. All right, we'll let that reach equilibrium and we'll come back in just a moment. Okay, small update, temperatures are still rising. We've reached 70 degrees on the CPU package, 71 now. Okay, I think our maximum temps have settled in. Now, per my usual approach, I'm taking the highest number that it's recorded. So CPU package has spiked as high as an 80 degree reading. A little higher than I'd be comfortable with. With that said, this system's not going to be under that kind of a load 24-7, but still. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to block off the holes that we don't want it using and see if that helps. Now, it's actually kind of hard to tell from looking at these temperatures because they're kind of all over the place. But with our blocked off holes, you can actually see from the curve that shows all of the core temperatures that we're getting a little bit more empty space. Under that 70 degree mark right there. So I would say yes, we did get a few degrees improvement by using this approach. This is kind of a funny story. I've got the architect of the fan shroud that we'll be installing for our second test. And he was about to explain to me why one of the pieces of the shroud has like this janky thing cut in it. So when I was modeling it originally, I forgot that there's, I think it's this thing. Yeah. Yeah. This thing is right in the way. So, oh, look, it perfectly fits now. Okay, so we actually had to change the motherboard. Yeah, I know. So now all my plans are wrecked. All the original measurements, like, is it significantly different? Nope. Okay. So now that you moved that where it belongs, this shroud should fit very nice. Oh, look at how perfect that is. It's so perfect. And I gave this buffer room here. I didn't make it as long as it needs to be because it can overlap a little bit. Your modesty is truly amazing. Yeah. Just be careful. Just... Okay. That's in. There's supposed to be flex room for it to be able to go in there. That's correct. Okay. Okay. Now, no, I want to do it. I want to do it. All right. And note that the design still allows these three fans to cool the network card, although we did not determine that we needed a shroud for that. That thing is in the way. I didn't model that. So it's supposed to be flush on the top. It's not the way I designed it, but yeah, I mean, it's supposed to be flush. I mean... It's mostly flush. Most of the airflow is going to make it to the heat sink, I think. All right. Which is okay because it won't kill the system to have a little bit of airflow over here. Looks cool, doesn't it? All right. Let's close it up and find out if our maniac scheme here worked. So for those wondering, we actually 3D printed this sucker on the Ultimaker 2 that we reviewed in the video that you can check out right over here. There you have it, folks. Absolutely fantastic. By using our 3D printed shroud to direct more airflow towards our passive heat sink, we were able to drop our CPU temperatures by somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10 degrees, meaning that even under full load, I would be extremely comfortable running this system all the time. It took a long time for us to get here, but our router is finally ready to load up PF Sense and deploy in the server room with our new gigabit connection. Woo! Oh, hi. I didn't see you there. You know what's great? Mastrop.com. Just head over to draw.ps slash Linus Tech Tips, and they'll always have all not always. Okay, but whenever we talk about it, they're going to have an awesome deal over there. Right now, they've got a DJI Phantom 3, and actually you can pick a variety of different models of the Phantom 3, depending on what you're into, but it's not just limited to drones over at Mastrop. Basically, they reach out to the community, they go, what kind of deals do you guys all want to see? And then people go, well, yeah, hold on, I'd love to see, you know, I don't know, that cool knife or that amazing keyboard or those headphones. And then Mastrop goes to the manufacturer or the distributor, they make sure they're getting authentic products, and if they can find enough people who are willing to buy, and a manufacturer who wants to sell, well, the more people buy, the lower the price goes. It's the more mass, the further it drops. It all kind of makes sense in sort of an internet logic type of way. So again, that's draw.ps slash Linus Tech Tips to check out not just that Phantom deal, but any of the awesome stuff that they have over on Mastrop. It's definitely a good way to kill some time and kill your wallet, and get some great deals while you do it. So that's it, guys. Thank you for coming along for the ride. If you disliked this video, well, I think you know what to do. 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