Unveiling UGM 3: Lessons that translate to building your own gaming machine.

Since we went all out when building the UGM, I spent a lot of time building and perfecting the system. Because of this, I would like to share some tips with you for building your own gaming machine, without most of the pain and headaches I had to go through. Essentially, I want you to get the most system, for the least amount of time. Here are some things that have a high payoff, with little headache.

Setting up SLI

SLI, or Crossfire for AMD graphics cards, has to be the single most effective way to boost the performance of your gaming computer.  These technologies allow you to combine multiple gpus and make them work together for your benefit. Combining multiple processors is a bit tricky when working with CPUs, as you know from the disappointing scaling we have been seeing in multi-core CPUs. GPUs on the other hand, scale much better, since it is somewhat easier to break up 3d graphics. For example, you can have a card render the bottom of the screen, and another render the top, you can have an individual GPUrender every other frame, or you can do scan line interlacing. There are of course, as with all things in life, diminishing returns. Four GPUs dont scale as well as three, and three do not scale as well as two. There is a new chip coming out... supposedly... called the Hydra that claims to be able to allow GPUs to scale far better than they current do, but lets pretend it is vaporware until we finally see it for sale.

Making this actually work, is VERY simple. Lets say you are using NVIDIA cards like the UGM, stick two, or three cards into their slots on their compatible motherboard. Then, place the SLI bridge across the two, this is a connector that allows the cards to talk to eachother. SLI with slower cards doesnt need a bridge, and high end cards can often work without it, but if you can, use one, it will greatly increase performance over using the system bus to transfer all of the data. Anyway, install the cards, install the bridge, install the drivers into windows, and your ready to engage SLI. Right click on your desktop, and go to "NVIDIA Control Panel."  Next, click on Set SLI and PhysX configuration. All you have to do is click on Enable Sli, and hit apply. Your screen will do some jiggly stuff and go black for a moment, then it will ask you if your happy with the new settings, and you say yes.

Thats it. Your computer is now twice as awesome at gaming, or more.

Setting up a RAID - 0 array

For the UGM motherboard we used an ASUS Striker II Extreme motherboard. The chipset for this board is an NVIDIA 790i model. All you need to do to build your RAID - 0 array is to start the system, go into the BIOS, enable the RAID controller on the motherboard, enable raid on the hard drives you want to use, then save and restart. When booting now after you see the BIOS screen, you will see a RAID screen flash up before the Windows boot screen. Hit the configuration key that it gives you access to the configuration screen. Select the drives you want, select "stripped" for the array, as that stands for RAID 0.

Hit accept, and you are done. You now have a really fast storage array.

Ways to boost performance that will probably give you a headache the first time you try it.

Case Modding to fit radiators.

I customized the UGM case by cutting and drilling a space into the top of it for the radiator to suck air from an mount to. Let me be clear about this, I live in a warehouse that has fully metal shop. Ask yourself before you get yourself into this and order the parts... "do I have the correct tools for this job? Do I know what I am donig?" If not, then stop right there and just buy yourself a case that is pre-made for water cooling if thats your plan, or has good enough airflow for your application.

Danger Den is one company that sells a number of cases for water cooling. Buy yourself parts that fit together rather than making your own, and take your time on your finishing touches.

Water cooling multiple graphics cards

Since there are three graphics cards in the UGM, there is very little room between them is very limited. The barbs that came from BFG were made by danger den, and they were so small that they drove me insane not getting them to leak. I replaced them with EK barbs that helped me keep the setup from leaking, but some other problems still exist. If you are trying to put the hose onto the two barbs, you have to pull the cards apart... something that you cannot do when they are in their slots. You have to therefore remove all three of the cards, guestimate the length of the tube you need, put the cards together before hand, and then try to put them all into their slots. Remember when removing these cards from their sockets, they have locks, so you have to somehow contort your finger into unlocking multiple slots at once.

You will tear your hair out over this. The EK barbs really help, but its very frustrating.

Solutions? Air cooling! Seriously guys, since the drivers for your GPU only let you overclock all three to the same speed, you can only go as fast as the slowest card... so just air cool them. Secretly NVIDIA has the ability to clock them independently, but they don't let you, and you did not hear that from me.  Anyway, the heat sinks on the cards you can buy these days are so massive, and effective, that you really are not going to see tha tmuch of an improvement out of an overclocked triple SLI setup on water, rather than air. Water cool your CPU, or one GPU if you want, but lets just leave the triple GPUs on air mmkay?

Extreme Overclocking

Overclocking is really very simple in concept. You essentially fiddle with your voltages and clock speeds until your computer starts to become unstable under high load, and then you drop it back a few notches. Sounds simple enough, yes? In practice however, you will spend hours upon hours running stress tests, blue screening, resetting, and starting over. 

Instead, just do a safe overclock, and be happy. Its when you are trying to get that last few .2 ghz out of your processor that you are going to get yourself into  trouble. Just go online, and google the type of processor that you he, and go a few hundred mhz lower than what most of the overclocking forums recommend. For example I have an Intel q6600 in my desktop, which is a quad core 2.4 ghz processor. Most people online are able to get it up to 3.2 or even 3.6 ghz on water, but I run mine at 3.0 ghz on water. Why? Because it is really not worth my time dealing in the voltages for hours on end.

Don't get greedy.

Unveiling The UGM: Part 2

The most obvious transition in technology that you see evident in this UGM, is the growth in the importance of GPU hardware. Early UGMs had one GPU, then you would find two gpus, and now with this UGM, three GPUs. I would say that the single most important components for the UGMs mind bending processing power, is its set of triple water cooled BFG GTX 280 graphics cards working in SLI. In the past GPUs were only only used for applications like video games and 3d CAD programs, but now as operating system GUIs require more graphics power, and as companies like NVIDIA allow devlopers to take advantage of the processing power of their chips for new uses with technologies like CUDA, I think we are seeing the GPU rise in importance to the level of the CPU, and maybe then suprassing it.   

You can see in Apple's most recent Macbook revisions, where they replaced  the nasty integrated graphics on their models with nicer NVIDIA silicon. This is evidence that GPU computing is going mainstream, and that machines are not designed for gamers must have discrete graphics hardware.  Now as applications for tasks as common

 a

s photo editing are able to use GPU acceleration, the general consumer... and in turn the people who design computers for them... can benefi

t from having a discrete graphics chip in their machine instead of integrated graphics. For pro users, this will make a large impact on the time that is spent processing and rendering. We could, for example, use a GPGPU program called Badaboom, from Elemental, to transcode three movies simultaneously from mpg to h.264.... at ultra high speed... simultaneously with the UGM. 

  Also evident in the UGM design, was our search for extremely fast data storage and retreival. We chose to stick two 10,000 rpm Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drives in the machine, and then link them in a RAID 0 array to combine their speeds. If we were to make the product selection at the time of its completion, rather than at the beginning, we would probably use the new Intel SSD drives that are available which provide comperable speed with only one device and no raid array. However, SSDs at this point still make some people uncomfortable about their potential longevity, though that is fading. Because of our discomfort in the fact that SSDs are untested over large periods of time, and that RAID 0 essentially doubles the possibility of loosing all of your data, we decided to pair a Drobo storage device with the UGM to make sure that essential data can be absolutely safe. If we were building a whole network to go with this UGM, we would have probably used a network attached storage device.

You may be noticing a pattern of multiple parts doing the same job at the same time. We are using two processors in RAID 0, we are using a chip with four cores, and we are using three graphics cards. I see this pattern of linking multiple parts together for high performance computing continuing on into the future. Even a new OCZ SSD drive that Ryan Shrout from PC Perspective recently reviewed has an internal RAID 0 setup from the factory to increase speed. I think its evident that parallel processing is here to stay, and even your grandmother one day soon will have octo-core hybrid-sli laptops!

 

Go granny go... goooo grannny go go go.

The biggest hold back in the progression of stream and multiprocessor computing, is the fact that software creators are still learning to to unleash the power that this hardware can offer. Programs have been in the past designed for single threaded CPUs, but with four or eight threads, three GPUs, and more to come, how are we going to break up the workload and spread it across the various parts? There are ambitious projects, like OpenCL, that aim to create an API to do just this effectively. This is going to be big.

- Colleen

Unveiling The UGM: Part 1

So boys and girls the time has finally arrived. The TWiT Ultimate Gaming Machine is complete.

For those of you who are just joining us on this journey, the UGM is the a project that the TWiT army started on at the end of 2008. The concept is nothing new, as it started a decade ago back on ZDTV, which became TechTV, and was then bought by G4. As all of us here know of course, TWiT live is where all the cool geeks are these days, and as such we had to take over the tradition.

So whats the point of building an Ultimate Gaming Machine? With few exceptions, playing modern video games at high settings, is one of the most computationally intensive applications that you can use a computer for. Building an UGM is an excercise in the state of the art in computing technology. The process of design, parts selection, construction, and setup of an ultimate gaming machien gives you a glimpse into the common household computer of tomorrow.

If you look at previous UGMs, you will see expensive "gaming parts" that were years ahead of their times. In the first ultimate gaming machine, many thousands of dollars were blown on a "large" widescreen monitor. Sure it was a crt, and was small by todays standards, but now everyone has transitioned to large format widescreen monitors.... or multiple ones at the same time.

Alright, so lets start off with the parts selection. The parts in the UGM include, but are not limited to...

1 - Intel q9770 3.2 Ghz processor overclocked to 4.2 Ghz. 3 - BFG H20C water Cooled NVIDIA GTX 280 graphics cards 1 - ASUS Striker II Extreme 790i water cooled motherboard 2 - Western Digital Velociraptor 10,000 RPM hard drives (RAID - 0) 2 - 4gb of Corsair 2000mhz ram sticks 1 - Lite-On Blu-Ray Drive 1 - Lite-On Blu-Ray Burner 1 - Custom water cooling system with parts from Petra's Tech Shop. 1 - Dell 30" monitor 1 - Razer / Microsoft Habu gaming mouse 1 - Razer Lycosa gaming keyboard 1 - Customized Lian-Li V2110 ATX case

What have we learned from building the UGM? So what in this UGM might be symbolic of future computing trends? How would we do it differently  with what we know now?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Unveiling The UGM and find out!

- Colleen