Best Of The Render Farm (Compilation)

E-I-E-I-Oh boy! It's a bountiful harvest in the Distractible Vault tonight, with a collection of Mark's updates on ol' bessy herself: The Render Farm! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:00Speaker 02

  This episode of Distractible is presented to you by T-Mobile 5G Home Internet.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  The folks over at T-Mobile have some big news for you. They now have the fastest 5G home internet, according to the experts at Ookla Speed Test. So if you want the fastest 5G speeds with a five-year price guarantee, visit t-mobile.com/homeinternet to check availability.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Price guarantee exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Fastest based on Ookla Speed Test. Intelligence data, second half 2025. All rights reserved.

• 1:28Speaker 04

  From eBay Escapades to solar-powered situations. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. It's time for Best of the Render Farm.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  So I have a new hobby, a new expensive hobby.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, we know about the lenses.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  All right, who's our next guest gonna be who like breaks the house trying to get you your thing?

• 1:53Speaker 02

  No, it's not like that at all.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Is it mobile games? They can be expensive.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  They can be, but it's not mobile games. I want to build a render farm.

• 2:02Speaker 03

  That's not as exciting as you're trying to make it seem.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Well, come on!

• 2:06Speaker 03

  I am personally, I do think that's interesting because I'm interested exactly in what the infrastructure for that is and how you said that. But like to normal people, that's an even tougher sell than lenses. I'm gonna be honest. I'm gonna be honest.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Oh, come on!

• 2:19Speaker 05

  I'm gonna let you cook here only because I filled up my Synology the other day. I've had it for, I don't know, 10 years. I've had it for a very long time and it's got 30 terabytes of storage. Last night I went to transfer some files, it's full up.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 2:32Speaker 05

  So if you've got space for me, Mark, I'm in.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, I think Wade, you'll like this because you know, when I was doing that whole hard drive stint, which people forgot about when the lenses took over, but I was doing a hard drive thing there for a bit.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, when you were thunderstruck, whatever it was called.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Thunderbolt. So I built a server that has 400 terabytes of storage, right? Cause I was like, I'm gonna future proof this. I had to win a whole hard drive kick. I got some refurbished hard drives. If there's one thing I love is that doing these hobbies and trying to find a good deal for them, even because it's so expensive, a lot of these things. So I always try to find like the good deal for it. So I bought refurbished hard drives and in every way, that's a big no, no, no, don't do that. But it just so happened in a specific situation that I did this, there was some cryptocurrency that was based on hard drive space I talked about before, yada, yada, yada. But render farm is different because it's extremely difficult to get server infrastructure at a cheap price.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Unless you just so happen to be in an era where everyone with a data center is replacing their hardware with this new fancy AI bullshit hardware and they're throwing everything out at incredible discounts. And you can find the most amazing server hardware ever on eBay for steep discounts.

• 3:51Speaker 05

  Okay, how much is a steep discounted 400 terabyte?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  Oh, you're not gonna like this.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  I'm talking like 50% plus discounts, right? How, how much is a 4090 right now, right? 49?

• 4:03Speaker 05

  Couple grand, isn't it?

• 4:04Speaker 03

  2200 bucks or something?

• 4:05Speaker 02

  4090s right now is like two grand, like around that. It's still very expensive. You can get some things with a 4090 in it, an entire CPU, RAM, like power supply, motherboard, case, all this shit for $2,400. So 400 more than the card and a 4090 in there, 400 more than the card itself for the entire. Fucking computer with an NVMe, two terabyte NVMe. It's got sixty four. Look, even my camera agrees.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  What the shit is? Why is that happening? Why is there a thumbs up on your face?

• 4:41Speaker 02

  So positive. You can get all that for twenty four hundred dollars. And that's, that's, that's still a lot of money, but you talk about getting a computer with a forty ninety in it for that. Now here's the real kicker. That's just.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Keep talking.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  That's just domestic level computer hardware, right? At steep discounts because now is a better time than ever in the history of forever to get a computer. Because there are so many companies that are trying to clear shit out to get this new shit in.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  What do I search for on eBay for this? Give me some keywords.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  What you want to look up on eBay is you want to find, you want to find the specific server grade processor that you want. Because what's happening is all these companies realize they need GPUs right now. So actually GPU deals are hard to come by for work, workstation level graphics. But you can still get good deals because people are still trading out computers. But you can get like sixty four, ninety six, hundred and twenty eight core processors in their server chassis. With all, with like a terabyte of RAM. I don't even know what you would do with a terabyte of RAM. For like eighty percent off of the cost and they are perfectly functional. Very modern, like only a year or two old, but because every company in existence is trying to get rid of what they have.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  And replace it with these bigger GPU based servers with like eight GPUs in them. You can get, you can get the craziest shit. You can get the craziest shit for so much less. There are processors out there that are like twelve thousand dollars. You can get, you can get two of them. You can get two of them for like a twenty five percent of the price, which is a lot. I haven't bought these, but this is why I'm like, now is the greatest time in the history of forever to build a render farm.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  I want to see your half a million dollar server setup.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  You don't need to spend half a million dollars. What was I just telling you?

• 6:27Speaker 05

  I don't know. I had left.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, you weren't here. Where did you go?

• 6:31Speaker 05

  I had important business to take care of.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  I'm with you, Mark. I see what you're laying down.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you see what I'm laying down? You see?

• 6:39Speaker 03

  Well, so what? You're gonna buy, well, you're gonna lease space and just buy a bunch of secondhand servers and set up a render farm thing for cheap for people to use?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  No, just do it in my garage. If I have to lease space, that's gonna cost more money. But if I do in my garage, where's the cargo? I don't, my car hasn't been in my garage for a year, man.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, he had movies set in there and stuff or whatever.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have a whole set in there. But once that's gone, now that movie's done, I have space for everything. And I put, I put air conditioning in there because filming in there in the summer was such a pain because it wasn't air conditioned. So I put an oversized air conditioner in my garage so I can have a server rack in my garage.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  I can't believe you filmed a whole movie in your garage. I didn't realize that.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  I picked up a lot of shots in my garage. I was basically talking about it for the past year, wasn't it?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  He did talk a lot about that. Yeah, I feel like.

• 7:24Speaker 05

  Oh, that's crazy. You know what, Mark? Points to, oh, someone.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  So I want to build a render farm. I want to get some sweet deals on some sweet computers and put them into my garage. And I'm sure that buying this shit off eBay is definitely reliable.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  Well, so you're saying eBay, these companies aren't going out of business, but they still probably like offload these to just like wholesalers or something, right? Can you go to like in-person auctions where this stuff would be even cheaper, probably?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  For sure. I haven't scratched the surface of where these sales are. I've only really just started looking and finding like incredible deals. If anybody knows the secret ins of where to get this shit for the cheapest prices, put it on the subreddit. Let me know about it. I'm about to start a rendering revolution because online render services cost way too much. And if I can do it from home, because I got solar panels, so I don't even need the electricity, okay?

• 8:20Speaker 05

  Man, if we have a zombie apocalypse, you're gonna be able to film movies from your house.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Mark's never gonna have to stop making content.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, one can only hope, one can only hope. Anyway, that's my small talk. My latest hobby? Have I told you guys about it?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Render farm?

• 8:34Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  My main man tug them forty four seven zero. You're the real. You're the real real. You get me the best discounts on possibly good server hardware.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  I'm sure they're all.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  I haven't even gotten it yet. I'm sure it's great.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Where are they coming from?

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Uh, Shenzhen, China.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Well, is that where all electronics come from?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  I feel you. That's going into possibly prejudiced territory, but keep going.

• 8:58Speaker 03

  I honestly, there's just like the manufacturing in China is like every piece of technology.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Where was the place where the the glycine factory was?

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Medical grade glycine.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Cool great glycine. Did you hear about this?

• 9:13Speaker 05

  Of course not. It's me.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  On TikTok, there was a huge trend where there was this nonstop talk about medical grade glycine. And there was this one.

• 9:21Speaker 05

  What is glycine?

• 9:22Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  I don't know. And I don't know what it's for.

• 9:24Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  I just know that medical grade glycine was very important.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  So there's there's certain things that you can do and CG is like computer graphics. A lot of it comes down to rendering, but there's there's a whole world of like art there that I know I'll never fully get. I won't be an expert at it, but at least the technology side is like, okay, for the sake of rendering, I can render and I can figure out how to do that. I can build a render farm, right? I know how to build a computer because I've done it before. I've done it for you. I look into it like a server can't be that different. And so this is where my brain goes. It goes from one to the other. I have a basis of knowledge. This is a problem that I'm facing. I think I can figure out, puzzle a way to a solution using my knowledge. You never have any like desire to do that?

• 10:07Speaker 05

  My knowledge is to socially outreach and find someone else who can solve my problem.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  I was gonna go into the spiel of all the hardware that I've come back to and talking about that and talking about the latest thing that's gonna make people so mad about me talking about it. I can't wait for people to be pissed off.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  Is it a render farm?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  I've heard of a drink. You can't say that word in front of him.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  Render farm? Did render farms kill his family?

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably. I'm gonna go with yes.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  Do you ever swallow and immediately know you did it wrong and you're fucked?

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Did you just do that unrelated to me saying the word render farm?

• 10:42Speaker 05

  Or was that? Completely unrelated. I was just taking a sip and my body was like, I should breathe that.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  I've been building my render farm. I'm a render farm expert. I'm an expert.

• 10:51Speaker 05

  You thought about that?

• 10:52Speaker 02

  I've discovered the magic that is blown fuses again. So turns out computers draw a lot of power. They a lot of power. And so for those that aren't aware that even just running one computer all day long is an incredible draw of power. It's like running a microwave constantly. So one of the things that I'm I'm looking into is getting a power into my house, like figuring out the power system. I'm trying to get like a better battery backup, but I was doing something yesterday that I was. Okay. So I was up on my roof, right? And I realized how cosmically stupid what I was doing was. I climbed up on the roof and I called for Amy, Amy. And I was like, can you pass me the hose?

• 11:37Speaker 02

  So she throws me the hose and there I am standing on my roof watering my solar panels because they're dirty and encrusted with grime. But I just like, I just was like standing there and thinking about it as this like wonderful era that we live in with all this technology and able to just grab electricity out of the air with solar panels. And there I stand with a garden hose being like, this'll fix it. Yeah, got it?

• 12:01Speaker 05

  Well, if you want to grow your solar farm, you've got to water it.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  It just, it just felt so dumb. What's happening? But then I.

• 12:10Speaker 05

  I thought you were gonna tell me you were cleaning out your gutters or something. I was not expecting the twist of watering your solar panel.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  No, no, because I could understand like cleaning out the gutters. And what I should have done is I I have a Ryobi power washer. And what's great about it is it has a hose attachment on it. But my hose isn't long enough and I didn't have the batteries charged. And I was just like, yeah, let me go up, see what they are. And they looked pretty crusty.

• 12:29Speaker 05

  Were you using the solar panel attachment for the hose?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Shut up.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  You know, they actually make a Ryobi solar panel cleaner. It's basically the same as a power washer, but it's designed to work way better on solar panels.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, cuz that stuff is crusty because I got done, I washed it off and I, you know, I felt like I was playing power wash simulator because I didn't have enough pressure cuz I had one of those little handles, but you know, at the distance, the wind alone was beating me. So I got done, everything was wet and I, I, I thought I washed it thoroughly. I saw some gunk runoff and by the time I got to the end, I went back to the beginning and the beginning was dry and it was just as dusty. It was like super, like just as crusted over, couldn't see a single cell and I'm like, damn it. So I bought, Amy bought a big mop with a big handle. So today when I go and mop my solar panels.

• 13:18Speaker 05

  If people out there wanna know what the celebrity lifestyle is like, it is mopping your solar panels on your roof.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  So yeah, that's what I get to look forward to. Um, and so I, I'm, I'm realizing that with all of this, uh, computer power that, man, I, uh, I, uh, um, uh, yeah, things are going good, things are going real good. I have all the parts assembled there, but I realized that I got the wrong, uh, case for it cuz I'm not building a server rack. I'm basically just building a few computers for, for my Houdini render farm. Um, but I got the wrong case size because, you know, it's been a while since I built a computer. I used to always do it and then I kind of fell into, um, people doing the custom water cooling solutions because I was like, I don't really wanna fiddle with all of that. So I'd rather get it from a company that's gonna do it. But for these, for these things, like the prices are so stupid for like business level stuff. That's why businesses don't make any sense.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  I don't know how businesses ever make money when they pay like business prices for things cuz you got like home internet. You pay home internet and it could be like up to a hundred dollars for good internet and that's, that's pricey. A business internet line starts in the thousands and I'm like, wait a minute, where does this jump occur? Why, why is this? But that's just what businesses pay for. They just do that and, and other people charge businesses like these exorbitant rates and it's, it's like, it doesn't make any sense because the price of these, these big workstation computers from a, from a pre-built manufacturer, like there's a markup for pre-built computers for consumer level hardware. What should be like a $10,000 computer if you bought all the parts in a very good computer, someone will mark up up to $50,000 for for the entire thing to be assembled.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  If you look at some of the higher end workstations, it doesn't make any sense. So I'm building it myself again, because I've done that before and it's not much different. But I got the wrong case because it's an SS, it's SSI dash EEB motherboard, not an EATX motherboard. And even though the case says ETX and the motherboard I bought was listed as ATX.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  Have you tried the EATASS motherboard?

• 15:16Speaker 02

  But what if we had in our movie theater, we had a LAN area, we had little pods where people could do like if they wanted to record YouTube videos or stream or something, we had little rooms segmented off where there was like one computer with a camera already set up and a light already set up. And also all those computers are part of my render farm.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  And we can farm Bitcoin while we play.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  No, no, no, that's not, you can't do it on normal hardware. That's not an efficient way to get Bitcoin.

• 15:45Speaker 05

  Not with that attitude.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Oh, that's why you're the handsome one.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  Ah, so you want to get me Bitcoin, you just don't know it.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Maybe, I don't know. I don't know what to believe anymore with you, but right? Isn't that a great idea?

• 15:56Speaker 03

  It's the best idea.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  No, well, I mean, I do have little things that I've been working on, but you know, I don't want to want to bog anyone down with my really cool ideas and things.

• 16:07Speaker 05

  Is it lenses and or render farm?

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Coca-Cola. For the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers. For the optimists, pessimists. For long distance love. For introverts and extroverts. The thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new. Coca-Cola. For everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  No.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  No, no, maybe you'd actually appreciate it. Maybe I actually appreciate it because it's only adjacent to it. I, I want, I'm trying to get back into water cooling. So when you're building a computer and this, this applies to people out there, you have, you can have the option of water cooling components. And it's kind of like a, it's a higher level way of building a computer, but it can yield like a lot better results than just air cooling. Because if you have a bunch of fans in your computer, the computer that I built for you was air cooled, you know, um, it wasn't water cooled. There was just like a big old air cooler on it, I think, unless I did put it in a.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Probably had an AIO, didn't it?

• 17:20Speaker 02

  I, that one with the Threadripper was the last one that I, I built there.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Oh, maybe not. No, maybe not.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have no idea. But either way, I've been getting into water cooling again because there's a lot of really funky new developments in the world of water cooling. And I've really wanted to try immersion cooling. Have you, you guys heard of this?

• 17:38Speaker 03

  I have actually.

• 17:39Speaker 05

  No.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  So immersion cooling is literally what it sounds like. You take your whole computer and you stick it in a liquid. You go.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  And that's okay for it?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  That's okay for it. It's so good for it, actually.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  It has to be the right kind of liquid.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It can't just be spit or piss or something like that. Yeah. Um, so you, you get a special fluid that's called dielectric fluid. It's non-conductive. So that when it's in there, it's not going to like zap. Cause the thing is water, pure water is actually not very conductive. It's the impurities in water that cause it to become conductive and that can cause it to short out and then it'll go ke bloom. So you need a pure, whatever this fluid is, you can't have like dust getting in it or anything like that. It takes some cleaning required and there's some extra things. But the way you can do is you can take your whole computer, really dense, like get the density way up and stick it in a, in a vat of fluid. And it'll circulate the fluid and it'll cool all the components in it, right?

• 18:30Speaker 05

  Do you run the computer while it's in there?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  Okay, go on, expound.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  So it's dielectric, right? So the fluid is entirely non-conductive. So all of your, your plugs and stuff in the computer, you power plug, it's in there, you know, it's, it's powered, it's got all the peripherals in there. This is usually for data centers and stuff like that, but there are people that, you know, their home computer, they basically get a fish tank, right? And they just put their whole, they build their whole motherboard and stuff inside the fish tank and then they fill it up with this fluid and you'll see it, it's pretty cool. I can actually pull up like, uh,

• 19:01Speaker 05

  Cause I'm picturing like your tower, you just shove it in a kiddie pool and then all the wires and stuff, it's like, does it just like bend up to come out of the tank? Are they like, how do you turn it on if it's in the tank? How do you keep it from getting impure?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  It's real tricky, but this is it.

• 19:14Speaker 05

  Okay. So like the tank is also the tower. It's not like the tower and a tank. The tank is also the tower.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  So this one's trickier. I think this one is at a higher risk of problems because the top is open, right? So you see the cables going into the top. The back of the motherboard is at the top of this fish tank that's in front of everyone. And so the plugs go in the top. Now, the problem with this is dust and impurities can get into the fluid this way. It's not sealed off. Ideally, you want something that's more sealed. And the other issue here is there's probably not as much circulation. I think this is, it's a, it's just more of a kind of a funny build that's actually looks like a fish tank. But in industrial applications, you put your entire server rack inside this fluid. You can get the density up. You just need it to circulate things and it's weird. It's super weird to look

• 20:00Speaker 02

  at. Your mind goes like, that's not right, but it works. It works and it works well. It cools things really efficiently.

• 20:07Speaker 05

  How pure are the rocks and the fruity pebbles?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Oh, essential. Essential for that. Yeah. You want your nineties ass color scheme, glow in the dark rocks at the bottom so that you can really get all the gaming juice out of your components. Yeah. So I'm looking into this and I'm probably going to break some things.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  For a computer or for a server sized stuff?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  For server sized stuff, but the problem is, you know, everything server sized takes a premium. So I'm trying to like, see if I, if I just get it big enough, you know, horse drinking trough, if I do that.

• 20:40Speaker 05

  How annoying is this to change out? Like, let's say, A part fails, you have to replace a part.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Pull it out, you shake it off a bit. I mean, it's about as annoying as like you can imagine it is. It's it's literally dunked in a fluid that's probably slightly toxic.

• 20:55Speaker 05

  But like, can you put your impure fingers in this liquid and replace the whole liquid?

• 20:59Speaker 03

  No, you should wear like gloves and stuff.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Ideally, you know, you're doing this in a very professional way, but you know, I'm not the most professional person.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  I mean, they make like filtration systems. There must be a type of filtration that you could use to filter your dielectric juice. Is it expensive? Is dielectric liquid, water, whatever? Because it's a special thing, right? You don't really buy it in 50 gallon barrels. You buy it in, you know, smaller containers than that.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  You know, like paint where they have that special paint that's so dark? It's like only 0.1% reflectivity.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  That is very expensive, but you can get black paint that is like 2% reflectivity, still extremely dark for way cheaper than that. Right? It's the same with these fluids. Some people have proprietary fluids that are crazy expensive that they have patents on and they sell because it's that much better at non-conductiveness or non-cooling or cooling capacity or stuff like that. And so these companies want to sell them at premiums, but you can get, there is dielectric fluid that you can get that will not be as expect as expensive.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  That's a cool.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  So if everything blows up, a lot of my things seem to like have a risk, high risk of electrocution and explosions. But that's how you know you're really, really starting to get somewhere.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  You're also starting to push your drowned man saga on yourself because like your power washing on your roof. And now you're getting liquid on your computer. You're starting to really toy with liquid. And as someone who deals with liquid, it's a dangerous game.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  I had a crazy idea to what if I pumped air through my pool? You know, because I thought Linus, you know, when he did his pool cooling for his whole server where he ran tubes. His problem was that he did liquid cooling underneath the pool. I'm like, what if you just pump air through the pool and then blow that air in and you got a cheap air conditioner, right?

• 22:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Is there, okay, perpetual energy? Not perpetual energy. What if, is there a way that you, you know how your water has, is pressurized, right? So you got water. What if, what if I have my water pipe, I build an illegal extension to go up really high, have it pour onto a giant water wheel that's going to generate electricity, but at the bottom of it, I just have it pump back into the pipe where it came out of. That way, the water company never knows. They never know.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, they have, they don't have anything for that. They have no idea.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Hey, that's how it works, right? I just have the open pipe at the bottom. It just, it funnels right back in.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  It would work.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  I just put the negative pressure terminal. Yeah, I just put it in reverse. Yeah.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  Like, I have some questions about it, but I'm just going to not ask them and assume you're correct.

• 23:33Speaker 03

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• 24:11Speaker 05

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• 24:35Speaker 02

  So I got a mystery. This isn't the episode. This is just a random aside that I want to talk about. So I, as you know, I've bought some refurbished computers, right?

• 24:44Speaker 05

  From Dell.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  And I had them running. I was running, you know, a little render farm. And I've been doing small scale experiments with these computers as I try to build out what am I do? So I had five computers running and for weeks now, they've been running fine. They've been working perfectly. I've actually, you know, done some experimentation with under clocking, you know, or under vaulting the graphics cards, yada, yada. It doesn't matter. Two nights ago, or yesterday morning, rather, I woke up, all five computers that I had running were offline, all five of them. And I'm like, well, that's strange. Not one of them. I load up each one of them. I load up the first one and I discover, oh, the boot drive is corrupted. It cannot boot, can't boot Windows. It does its self diagnostics. All the hardware is fine. It can't boot Windows, can't boot at all. It can't even find the boot drive. So I load up the next one, two of five, same thing, boot drive corrupted.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  And here's the thing, I don't know if me even talking about this is painting a big target on my back.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  Oh, it definitely is.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  But I'm going to keep talking about it because it's just fascinating. All offline at this point. Third one, same deal, same exact problem, boot drive corrupted. Fourth one, boot drive corrupted. Fifth one, boot drive is corrupted.

• 25:45Speaker 05

  What time was this that you found this?

• 25:47Speaker 02

  I don't know what time they all went offline because I couldn't find any logs or anything like that. I didn't have anything robust to set them up. These were just render notes. They didn't have anything on them. They were just running. Two pieces of software, basically, is all they were running. So they were technically connected to the internet. I didn't even have monitors connected to them. So I had, you know, I was remoting into them just to even get there. But I had to like, I have a little like clamshell KVM so I can plug into them and see what's going on. And I'm like, that's super weird. What are the odds that five computers in different parts of my house? All running the same software, but also other computers in my house were running this software as well. All of the, only the Dell ones shut down and got corrupted.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  Can I pose a positive theory here?

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's up?

• 26:29Speaker 05

  Okay. Do you remember the story we just told the bird and the chipmunk wizard theory?

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  What did we talk about yesterday on this podcast when we were recording? We talked about Adele and boots.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Go on.

• 26:39Speaker 05

  And now your Dell's won't boot?

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  I'm just saying. Put the tinfoil hats on because, uh, what day did that issue occur? Oh, yeah, during the Adele Boots Day. Bob gave one hint all day. You know what that hint was? Boots.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. That implies that this is my fault somehow.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  Remember that song? Never mind, I will find a render farm like you. Adele.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  All right, so this is very strange, right? So I contact Dell Customer Service and I've got a, I've got a customer service gripe to pick because.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  All right.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Clearly, this isn't normal, right?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  No, that's pretty weird.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  It's very strange. My only guess is that it was some type of malware that somehow got into the computers. And again, this like maybe painting a big target on my back. I have no idea, but something got into the computers and corrupted the boot drive. It's very easy to cause these things to become unstable. If you like delete system 32 or something like that. You can basically render a whole computer by doing that. And it would just cause a bunch of problems. It wouldn't, it would not be able to boot anymore. It wouldn't be able to repair itself. I'm not saying doing that would do that, but you know, a lot of things can be done.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  That just doesn't have a lot of value to the malicious party, other than fucking your shit up, I guess.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I have no idea either. So I reach out to like Dell Customer Service and I knew something was wrong when I was being answered by the Dell Social Media Team, which was a little strange, but I hoping that that's Dell's customer service on the social media team. And I go through this all day. I'm like, this is weird, right? Can you help me find, figure out why this is happening? I was like, okay, let's troubleshoot it. So they run me around for hours and hours doing all these troubleshooting tasks that I keep saying like, yeah, I've done the basics. I've done your diagnostics. There's nothing wrong with the hardware. And then it goes on and on. They keep leading my, like, you're gonna find out why this happened, right? Like, no, let's just do the next step. You're gonna find out why this happens, right? Let's just do the next step. You're gonna find out what happens, right? All right, create a thumb drive with a Windows installation on it. And I'm thinking in my head, I'm doing anything to not do this because if I format that drive,

• 28:43Speaker 02

  any evidence that of what happened on that computer is going to be erased or become much harder to find if I do a fresh install of Windows on it. And I keep asking them like, this. And they're like, please just do the next step. We are going through this. This is the process. We need to get it. I'm like, okay. And so I reinstall it, do that. And then I tell them like, okay, I'm in Windows. Now what? And they're like, great. Let us know if there's any problem. Keep an eye on it. Have a good day. And I'm like, you motherfuckers. You sons of bitches, you had no intention of finding out what went wrong with it at all. I was like, just take this computer back and look at have have computer. There's such a thing as computer forensics. You can look into the hard drive and find out some logs. You can dig in there and you can, but they had no desire to do any of that.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  They were never going to do it and they strung me along the entire time.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  Did you do all five or did you say, do you have any that are still?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  No, I only did one.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  I only did one because I have all five with the same problem, but they would not admit, they would not admit that five going offline for the same reason, all independently of each other, wasn't weird, right? And they kept thinking like, it's just like a random software corruption. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. The odds of random software corruption occurring across five machines at the same time is statistically most likely improbable, or not impossible, and nothing's impossible, but whatever. It seems much more likely that this is some kind of security vulnerability that was exploited or something like that. And it's only these. It's my other computers are fine.

• 30:14Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Only these. What's up with that?

• 30:17Speaker 05

  It was kind of brilliant. Now they've got you as a complicit party in covering up the evidence. If you do get a forensics specialist, they're going to see that you covered up one of the five.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  The what? What crime is being?

• 30:30Speaker 05

  I don't know, man, but it's pretty bad if Dell's getting you involved in the cover up.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  You're right.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  And they got the social media team involved. So that way the moment you try to say anything, they're like, they've already got the posts ready. Mark covers up corruption at Dell.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  You're right.

• 30:43Speaker 05

  Inside job.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  That's it. That's it. That's the one. That's it. And look, it's like, I know what can they do? All I wanted was them to just escalate it to the next level of being like, yeah, this is weird enough. Maybe you should look into this. It's probably nothing. It's probably something like as I was running them, like it was some port was not forwarded correctly in the computer. It allowed someone to get in or a virus to get in. I'm not saying this was like a specific attack. It just seems like this is malware riding across the software for the render farm thing that I was using that allowed like some piece of malware to get in, deleted a system thing and boop, all the thing go. Yeah. It's more likely that that happened, but it's also worth exploring. I can't use these computers if that's possible.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  That was my point to them is like, I can't rely on these to do what I need them to do if there is something like that in them. I don't think it's the software I'm using because I'm using it across my other computers, but maybe again, it might be.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  I mean, it might be like a driver compatibility where it's the software and some specific thing in the Dell machines. And they all have it because they're all the same machine or something, but.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  No, it's weird to corrupt the boot disk like that is like not, what would normally happen is they would just blue screen. And then you could, you could get it to post and maybe it would continue to have an issue. You have to do drivers or reinstall or whatever, but like.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  I'm not an expert, but as far as I know, that's a much weirder outcome.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  That's not something where it's like whoopsie doodles and then your whole boot drive is just corrupted. That's a different kind of issue.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  It's very strange.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  You guys are basing too much stuff on facts here. I think Bob's earlier theory about the wizard chipmunk. He's trying to get his revenge because you caught him like practicing his bird, which wasn't perfect. So he was like half chipmunk. And then he fully went chipmunk and he's like, fine, I just won't even be a bird. Fuck this guy.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  It is strange.

• 32:23Speaker 05

  And then he followed you home as a chipmunk and attacked your computers to get back at you.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  I did think, I was almost positive that when I first saw that bird, it was a chipmunk first. That's what I saw in my mind. I might've seen a shape shifting chipmunk.

• 32:37Speaker 05

  I think Bob was originally right.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  It's just a glitch in the matrix. Here, let me give you, let me give you a Wade solution here. Hang on.

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm ready.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  All right, Mark. I know how to solve this problem. It's not the Dell computers themselves. What you need is a Costco sized jug of lighter fluid and then a lighter to light the lighter fluid. And then what you do is you take all of your computers and you set them in a smaller area, small enough where you could draw a circle on the ground around them in lighter fluid. And you want to use like the whole bottle, like as much as you can. You might need multiple bottles. I don't even know. But you basically want all of the wires, all of the networking stuff, all of the computers all inside this circle. And before you turn them. On to do anything, you light the lighter fluid. So you've got a wall of fire around all of your computers.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  Those are important to protect you.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  I know this about technology. The firewall will keep you safe, Mark.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  I've heard of this mythical firewall.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  I've got an alternate.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:30Speaker 05

  Wizards are sometimes like the male equivalent of witches and we know from even dating back to like the 1940s or even earlier, witches don't like water. So if you pour water on each machine, you'll melt the witch out of them.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. I have a pool. Could I just throw them in the pool?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  In theory, yeah.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Okay. All right. Cool.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  No, you know what, Mark? You were telling us about how you wanted to do water, computers in water, right? You were talking about that. We talked about that. What you do is, because he said the water needed to be a special kind. It needed to be thick or something. Get a bunch of the leftover thicket that you have from redacted. Get a, get a bathtub filled with thick water and then just submerge all the computers in there. That'll melt the witch out and keep it out. Plus then they'll be real cool because of what you were saying about water cooling.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you, you listened.

• 34:17Speaker 05

  Or get a snake big enough to eat a chipmunk or a small bird because clearly that's the only thing the wizard can turn into. Release a snake into each computer. So that way if the wizard comes back, it's ready to be gobbled up.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  That's good defense.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  If you could find a species of snake that can survive underwater, you could combine some of these solutions.

• 34:37Speaker 05

  That's true too. If you can find a fire that can burn underwater.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Are you jotting these down for later?

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'm really, really keeping track of everything that we're doing today.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  I appreciate that.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Well, that's, I really appreciate you guys helping me out and I appreciate being able to rip out something else.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  Someone out there is like, oh my God, Mark is under attack. I need to get him a message. Totally happy.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Anyway, Glaber Salt, G L A U B E R apostrophe S. Glaber Salt, remember the name. It's gonna change the world.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  How so?

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Well, that's what for us to discuss. Just chucking it out there. Glaber Salt.

• 35:15Speaker 03

  I feel like generating heat is not as much of an issue in the world as dissipating heat and avoiding excess heat generation. Is.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  You're yes, yes. Go on, go on.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  Well, this doesn't seem to well, his globus salt used in like heat exchangers or something like, what are we talking about? Like, is this?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Cause almost, almost. So here's the thing, you boil water, you put your globus salt in it and that mixture alone creates a concoction that would freeze at 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 35:43Speaker 03

  That's scientifically true, but that doesn't mean it's cold.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Now, now here's the thing, if you add regular table salt to your mixture, you will lower the freezing point of that mixture. Same way as if you put salt on ice, it'll start to melt because the freezing point is now lower than what it should be. You can, if you put a certain ratio into it, I don't remember it off the top of my head, you can create a mixture that will freeze at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Exactly what most people might consider room temperature. And if you put xanthan gum, it'll turn into a gel so that it's easier to, you know, handle than just like pure liquid. And then you have a gel, like a gel pack that'll freeze at 70 degrees. And what that takes advantage of is the fact that phase change, it's called a phase change material.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  It has, it takes so much more energy to get it to change its phase than it does to get it moving a degree. So it'll stay at 70 degrees way longer. And all this circles back to the concept of my render farm. So I figured if I make enough of this shit and stuff my render farm full of it, it'll stay at 70 degrees because there's so much ice, but warm ice, globus ice.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  So I don't know enough about thermodynamics to like really contribute to this. But what you're saying sounds right. So basically what you're saying is you would, you would put all this stuff where the, the face change point is right about 70 degrees. It would constantly be in and out of phase, like it would be kind of part liquid, part frozen, because the, the racks would generate heat. So they would heat, but then the phase change of all the globus salt solution goop, it would extract, but they're, but globus salt is still, still a poor thermo conductor, right? So would it really?

• 37:33Speaker 02

  When mixed with water, it becomes as good of a thermoconductor as water is. So by itself. So here's the thing, right? The weird thing about 70 degree phase change material is if you think of the world we live in, at night, it usually gets below 70 degrees.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  In a lot of places.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Even in the desert, it can get down because the sun is not shining and is cold. It will freeze overnight if it's in an environment where it can for free. Anyway, Glaber salt is cheap. So the thing is, if I get an industrial cook thing pot, an industrial boiler pot.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  I mean, the industrial boiler probably implies that it's a very large pot for boiling stuff. I don't know.

• 38:19Speaker 05

  Hey Siri, what's a kitchen?

• 38:20Speaker 03

  So Mark, if Glaber salt is such a magical, cheap material that is so simple to implement, why hasn't anyone else done this?

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know.

• 38:31Speaker 03

  That's fair.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  I don't know what it is about it, but ever since I heard about Glaber salt, I can't stop thinking about it. And it's not even that it's the Glaber salt, really. It's like, I don't know if there's a name for the mixture of what it is afterwards, but that's science. Like you can do the science. I just need to figure out a way to make a 422 kilograms of it.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  I think the thing for me that I'm sticking on is the point is not, I'm with you that it freezes at such a high temperature that basically freezes for free, but that it's a solid, right? Or it's a goof anyway? The way water, the way water cooling works is the heat is not dissipated just because water absorbs heat. It's dissipated because water absorbs heat and then is cycled away from the electronics.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's not what I'm doing. If I put it in the room and then put a fan on it and blow the air.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  But you're, but, but heat, heat saturation is a thing. The whole, the whole thing, well, you don't shut down server farms overnight, do you? Part of the point is they sort of run 24/7. Is there a downtime?

• 39:29Speaker 02

  It'll be, it'll be fine.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Are these like, you change out the Glaber salt packs or something with?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  No. That'd be too heavy.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  No. So Mark, what if you make your globber salt solution, your high, high freezing point solution with mineral oil? And then in you submerge your stuff in a globber salt mineral oil tank. So that then you don't have to cycle it. The phase change occurs and as the heat builds up, the phase changes out. But then it cut like it freezes. It's like an expanding contracting water cooling rig.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  I love that. And I think that's incredible. However, I feel like it would mess up with the freezing point if it was mixed in mineral oil.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have no idea what the freezing point of mineral oil actually is. I don't know how that's different. I know it's not water. So.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  What I was gonna do is I'm gonna make an evaporative cooler. So I'm going to McMasters car and I'm gonna buy a bunch of ductwork. And I'm gonna get some ventilation fans and it's gonna build a little evaporative cooler. And the cool air from there is gonna blow over the globber salt mixture. And I'm gonna have a heat exchanger inside there that's gonna be like basically encapsulated by all of the globber salt mixture. And then some working fluid running through that going to another heat exchanger inside the render farm room. And a fan on that blasting all of that delicious cold, free air conditioning, baby. Not free. It costs a lot to build it and all that stuff.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's, it's essentially a normal water cooling setup with extra stuff that's definitely gonna go wrong.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  It's globber salt. It's globber salt. You gotta have faith in the globber.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Are you getting custom like heat sink blocks for all your little chipsets and cards and things? Or are you just sort of setting it near it?

• 41:09Speaker 02

  No, I'm not. You keep thinking about a slather my electronics and globber salt. No, it's air. It's just air.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Okay. It's just air circulation. You're just using the, the salt solution to cool the air to a crisp.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a cold battery. It's a battery of coldness, but room temperature coldness.

• 41:25Speaker 05

  How is small? For you guys. How's it been?

• 41:27Speaker 02

  You know how it be. Every day, another failure. Every day I rise, grind, fall flat on my ass. This render farm is never happening. I swear to God, everything I've tried, I fuck you not. It is not going good. I thought I knew computers. I've assembled three different computers. Let me just say, don't buy cheap shit on eBay. Half of it doesn't fucking work.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  You don't have any support. You don't have any backup. You can't return it because it's coming from a city I can't even pronounce. And then late, the latest adventure was in my adventures with water cooling, right? I've never built a water cooled computer with a custom loop before, but I was like, hey, I went to engineering school. I can do this. And I, I set up everything. I made sure that I actually got parts that I could verify, like accounts still on eBay, still discounted, but there was like someone I could communicate with and I got parts and then I sourced all of my water cooling stuff from a company that's actually here in LA who was very helpful. I asked for the lot of advice and they gave me guidance and I put it all together and I turned it on and I started filling

• 42:37Speaker 02

  the reservoir with liquid and I'm, I go through two bottles and I'm like, wow, the guy only said I need one. This is a thirsty machine.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  And when I get through the second bottle, this pump just keeps chugging this liquid. I'm like, damn, it's going. And then I finally noticed it's a clear liquid. So I know it's so dense with components that I didn't notice the entire bottom of the case is swimming in the fluid. Somewhere in the loop, there was a catastrophic leak and it was just gushing. So it would go through the pump.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  You, it never occurred to you that at no point did it start coming in the return to the reservoir?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  You didn't know now that I'm thinking about that, it should have been obvious, but I'd never built one before. So I was like, wow, this is crazy.

• 43:32Speaker 05

  So you doubled the amount it recommended. You were just, man, this is thirsty. That was your thought?

• 43:37Speaker 02

  I don't know. The server right now, I took all the electrical components out of it besides the power supply. I just so happened to grab the power supply that was, makes a clicking sound with the fan. Like, I don't know what kind of trailer all of my shit fell off of that I bought. Don't buy discount shit on eBay. It's not worth it. It's not going to be worth it. It won't. It's so many nightmares. I wish. wasted so much money, I should just trust this company because holy shit.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  I just gave you points for the drowned farm. Also for listeners out there, he pointed to a shirt that says Steiger Dynamics.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, Steiger Dynamics. Oh, you like the listeners now. And what sucks also is like, I've been, I've been doing this. I, I run into all these little problems. So this is actually a 4090.

• 44:27Speaker 05

  He's holding a 4090.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  The 4090 graphics card that I have unmounted from its previous cooler and put this nice thin one slot cooler. Right? It's one slot. That's what it's, it says, there's only one, it'll.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  Well, it's a little wide.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  It's, no, it's one slot. This son of a bitch is not one slot by two millimeters. It was all, everyone said this was a one slot cooler. The company that made it then came out with another for this exact board, the reference board that this is. A more expensive one that is actually one slot. And I contacted them and I said, hey, is this available? And they said, yes, but you have to order a minimum of a hundred. Jesus Christ.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  A hundred?

• 45:17Speaker 02

  I said, oh, I didn't respond. I haven't responded.

• 45:20Speaker 05

  How expensive are these, if I may ask?

• 45:22Speaker 02

  The 4090 themselves are fairly expensive. So this is.

• 45:26Speaker 05

  I, I mean the one slot one.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  The one slot thing I got for, uh, this thing was a hundred and I believe 60 plus tax and something like that. So a hundred and 60 bucks for the cooling block itself. But if you know a 4090, it goes from a three slot card down to one. And I was like, that.

• 45:43Speaker 03

  Which would be awesome.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  It would be awesome if it fucking did the thing that it said.

• 45:49Speaker 05

  Well, if you buy a hundred of them, it will.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  You're right. I sure will.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  The solution is to buy more stuff, Mark. Then the new stuff you buy will work probably. And if it doesn't, then you could just go buy other new stuff and that'll be the stuff that works.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  And it's like, all of this is an attempt to save money. Everything I've done is an attempt to save money. I have lost so. Much money. Well, I haven't lost it, right? Cause I could sell this again, and that's fine. It's just work to do that. The, the other computers that all crashed at once. Dell also extremely unhelpful. And then the episode that where I talked about came out, suddenly they wanted to help so badly. And I'm just like, oh. Hmm. Interesting. Whatever, guys. I don't know.

• 46:34Speaker 05

  Hey, you can't have eggs without breaking a few eggs.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I could technically sell this and this is still useful to, to people. It's still useful to me. Like it, it's still like, okay, you can put this in a loop. This still works fine. I-

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a normal forty ninety, right? That's not like a, like a workstation one or something weird where it won't, won't do video games or normal computer shit.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  Perfectly normal forty ninety. And, and actually I could probably sell it for more than I, I paid for it because I've modified it in a way that's valuable.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. With the water block. That's actually pretty sweet.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  But just so you know, anybody, if I sell it, it's not one slot.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  Only if your slot's two millimeters too thin, like Mark's slots.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Right. Why don't you get girthier slots?

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Have you got the wrong slots, Mark?

• 47:15Speaker 05

  Why don't you just increase the gap a little bit?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  I'll just stretch my motherboard out a little. I don't really have a story to tell other than we're so back, baby. Buying random computer parts off of eBay is the successful way to do everything. You know how I said that it wasn't, it is. And we're back in.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Oh shit.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  We're so back. We're so back because I have not had one success. Wait, that sounds bad. I have had not just one success. I have not had one success.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  Not a single goddamn success.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Oh, I've not had a single. I've had a double. I have now two functioning dual processor computers that I built myself. One of which is right here and I'm gonna show you guys.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  I'm so excited for this.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  What the fuck? What the hell? What? Oh my god.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  This is one of them.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ, that's enormous.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  They're so portable.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Mark is lifting up a very large looking computer for the listeners.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  It looks like he stuffed a wig inside.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  Oh wow.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  That's, that's one of them.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  That's large. That slides into our server rack of some port, some type?

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a server case.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  It doesn't seem to be plugged into anything. How you know it works?

• 48:38Speaker 02

  I plugged it in before. I just don't have it on right now because in this room, if I have both it and this computer on, it'll blow a circuit.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Oh, fun.

• 48:45Speaker 05

  How many, how many did you build total?

• 48:47Speaker 02

  So far, two. Uh, this one is dual processors that I got off eBay.

• 48:52Speaker 03

  Are those like Xenon processors or whatever, like server ones?

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, so these are, they're actually these ones, uh, right here. So these.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  I got these for like less than 10% of the price of what they retail for. I don't know how and I don't care.

• 49:07Speaker 05

  Well, just wait two weeks when they stop working again.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 49:11Speaker 05

  Didn't you build like five of these and you had to send them to Stigian?

• 49:15Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, what?

• 49:16Speaker 05

  To look at them? You were like, help me?

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Are you trying to say Steiger Dynamics, our favorite computer, uh, company?

• 49:23Speaker 05

  God fucking damn it, dude. I hate words. Yeah, that's it. Didn't they, didn't they help?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're helping.

• 49:29Speaker 05

  Okay, so is this a separate computer or one of the ones they looked at?

• 49:32Speaker 02

  This is a separate one. Yeah, so we're working in tandem.

• 49:34Speaker 05

  I'm just trying to follow the timeline.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what I, what else I did, the second one, I have an eight GPU server out in my, uh, storage. There was no way that I could fit eight 4090s unless I change the cooling block, right? So what I've been doing is I've been putting these water cooling blocks on them.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  The ones that were like two millimeters too thick or whatever it was?

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, those are too thick, but that's not, it, it's not too thick for that one. Water cooling, that whole thing would take a whole thing. So what I realized is the actual 4090 I have, if you take off the fan off the top of it, the actual radiator is less than two slots. There's no fans on it, but it's less than two slots. There are these stands on the sides of it that go up past two slots. All I gotta do is cut those off. Can I take some scissors? And I'm like, it must be plastic, not plastic, metal. Grab a Dremel, put the metal cutting head on it. Metal dust everywhere, all in the electronic components.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  That's really good for electronics. Yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Airbrush, blast it out. First one, done. Not gonna do that again for the seven others. Go to Home Depot, grab tin snips, because I'm like, I bet they're aluminum, not aluminum, steel. So you squeeze really hard with the tin snips and you bend it back and forth. It'll break eventually.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  Then you got these real jagged, scrapey posts on the edge of your GPU.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  Oh, so sharp, so razor, like after it would break off, it wouldn't break off like it would limply fall over. It would go ping and they would go flying in a random direction. It was crazy. So seven of those went by and I fit eight GPUs into this server. And at this point, I decided to Google if I was doing this right. Nope. I tried to calculate the thermal capacity of these cards if they were just purely passively cooled, what the airflow would need. And then I couldn't find an answer. So I said, I bet it'll be good enough. And I turned the server on.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  And it worked. It fucking worked. I was watching the temperatures. So long as I kept the power of the cards individually, you can limit the power. They're normally 450 watt a card, which at eight cards is about 3,600 watts or 3.6 kilowatts. But if you limit the power to a reasonable level, like 33% of what it should be, it works.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  Oh, that's fine. You don't need to use all the power.

• 51:59Speaker 05

  Why not just use three cards at full power?

• 52:01Speaker 02

  No, the only reason that I have it at 33 right now is because it will blow a fuse. But the reason with 4090, that math weighed, a lot of people on my member mixer pointed out. It doesn't math because the 4090 is already an overpowered card. So at 450 watts, it's actually not as efficient as it could be. If you lower it, and they've, there's tech YouTubers that have done analysis of this. You can lower the power target to 60% and only lose 10 to 15. 15% of performance. So you gain a huge power saving up to 33% for about 10 to 15% performance loss, which is great. It's actually phenomenal. And it's because the 4090 was

• 52:42Speaker 02

  overpowered. They they put the power target so high. It's like it's already overclocked as the design comes in. But if you bring it down, you'll get barely a dip in performance. If you're gaming, it would be imperceptible. If you're doing rendering tasks, it's a matter of like a few seconds, like longer, and you can make it work. And I'm making it work. The render farm is happening. Yay.

• 53:05Speaker 05

  What are you gonna render once it's all done? What are you making?

• 53:07Speaker 02

  My movie stuff, like balls and water and stuff. I'm gonna make the greatest, most high fidelity 3D porn the world has ever seen. Yes.

• 53:19Speaker 05

  Yes. I might still have the computer tower that has, what was that game? Yephilicious on it somewhere if you want it back.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Don't say that publicly.

• 53:28Speaker 05

  Oh, I mean, what's porn? Is that Jake Gyllenhaal's new movie? Well, congrats on your functional render farm. How many, how many more are you gonna make? Like, how many, how big will this get?

• 53:40Speaker 02

  So they, Steiger Dynamics is working on six computers that have, are gonna be like the base render nodes. I've actually been talking to the people at Houdini, so that they, they can know how best to set this up. Steiger Dynamics can know how best to set this up in terms of networking, but I've also been working with them because I'm trying to get more CPU power. CPU power is like the thing for fluid simulations. The GPUs are great for rendering the actual final images, but the CPUs are necessary for any kind of physics simulation stuff. There might be a time in the future where that's not true, but right now, you can get CPUs a lot cheaper than anything else because of the way that it's

• 54:24Speaker 02

  it's structured for simulations right now, and because everyone's crazy for GPUs right now. So that's why the professional level GPUs that actually fit in those cases are way too expensive. So if I can fit a 4090, oh, the back of the, the back of the server can't close because the 4090s are too tall. It looks real jank, but it works.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  That just improves airflow, I'm pretty sure.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  It sure doesn't, especially when you got only passively cool cards. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna like tape off the sides where like the triangle of it goes up like this. And, and I'm gonna tape off the side so it actually does kinda still go towards the back.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Oh, is it? Oh, it's supposed to be drawing and that opens up a big leak in the IC. No, all you need is just get some box fans and just aim those right in there.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  You're right. You're right.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  Or get a spray bottle when it gets too hot, just.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Get the stuff you're allowed to put your electronics into. What's, what do we, what was that called? Dielectric flu, just spritz it with a little dielectric juice, cool it right off.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  So you guys know how I'm trying to do this stupid server room render farm thing, right? So in my genius, I was like, I'll buy some more solar panels. Cause right now you can actually get them for fairly affordable rates. The prices have come down.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  Dude, everything is so cheap in Mark's world. What, where do you live that every, every servers are cheap? Processors are cheap.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  He's Mark, so he has his own version of eBay he can log into where everything's just discounted for him.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  If you buy refurbished things, you, you can get them at cheaper prices, way cheaper. And they're only partially used. Solar panels are good for 25 years and they lose. They have a rating of how much power drop that they'll experience over a period of time.

• 56:02Speaker 05

  The quality is so much worse though. I bought used dinner and it was terrible.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Yes, I'll have the refurbished ribeye and the potatoes off that lady's plate over there.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  The thing is like, if you get things, you get them refurbished and you do, you put some DIY spirit into there. You can get things at pretty good rates. Now that being said, I am, I am spending more because I'm investing in building something. That's why I'm doing it. I bought solar panels, right? And so you can read online that this solar panel is like 65 inches by 44 inches is about the dimension of this panel. And I'm like, okay, that, I got that size in my head. I ordered, you can order them by the pallet. That you get bulk pricing and I'm like, okay, I mathed out. I think that this area could cover about 28 to 30 maybe. Solar panels, depending on how I arrange it. There's a pallet here says 31 refurbished, high quality.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  Barely a few years old. I'll get it. That pallet weighs 1,680 pounds.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  And my hero of a FedEx freight person got it delivered down my driveway.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  So how?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Ah, look, dude.

• 57:18Speaker 05

  One guy is like looking at his chart. He's like, oh no.

• 57:22Speaker 03

  Your driveway is treacherously steep. I cannot imagine.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  I was ready. I told them I was ready. Yeah, just put it at the top. I'll bring them down one at a time. And even then, if I, if I had to deal with that, I would be looking at a nightmare because 65 inches is five foot six.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  That's taller than you.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  No, no, it's shorter than me.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  Okay, it's, it's half an inch shorter than you. You're right.

• 57:44Speaker 05

  It's close enough where I had to think about it.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  But they're very large, right? If, if it was in this room, the pallet would take up like 70% of the room.

• 57:56Speaker 03

  Oh, Jesus God, that's enormous.

• 57:59Speaker 05

  Well, you have 31 things that are basically five and a half feet by what? Four feet ish?

• 58:04Speaker 03

  They're all as, almost as tall as Mark and wider than I am, which is to say extremely wide.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're huge. They're enormous and I have to haul them up to my roof.

• 58:16Speaker 05

  It's really nice of you to put all that power right back in the grid and not get any for yourself, though.

• 58:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're not going to hook those up to your house, right? You're just going to keep, you're just going to send that juice into the grid.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I just do in my public duty, you know, just really, really got to do it for the people.

• 58:32Speaker 05

  I imagine some poor guy working on a power line and then Mark just plugs this thing in like a Christmas tree. And all of the power goes flying. This guy like a hermit scream. Well, Wilhelm.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  The line bulges as the tsunami of power comes down the line at him like a cartoon. It's just like, oh.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  The guy's like, oh no, I gotta get down.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  Lightning bolts wearing sunglasses are coming out the sides. Some of them have guitars playing rock and roll songs.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  That was small talk? That was all small talk?

• 59:04Speaker 03

  That's what I did yesterday, Mark. What do you think we're talking about? You bought 10 kilograms of some unknown metal and I.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  I can't wait for the subreddit post. I can't believe Mark bought 10 kilograms of silver.

• 59:20Speaker 05

  It's how you turn on the render farm. You have to put it in the slot.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  It's coin operated. It's very expensive.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, they got me.

• 59:30Speaker 05

  And you pull a big lever and then you render.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  That'd be great if I could set it up that way.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  I'd like to render a ball floating in water. Chukk, cherry, cherry, oh, bar. A zombie crashed, fuck.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  I'm doing good. My render farm is rendering. It's very powerful and it takes a lot of electricity.

• 59:55Speaker 05

  You're in the future now, so maybe it takes less.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  No, more.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  But you got your solar all fixed, probably, right?

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  I didn't. I bought a 30 foot pole, but then I hesitated or I didn't hesitate. I didn't hesitate at all. That's the wrong word. Forget I said that word. I underestimated how unwieldy a 30 foot pole is. Cause when you have extended all 30 feet, it's not only extremely heavy at that mechanical dis leverage disadvantage, uh, but also the, the, the pole itself just goes

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  just, uh, droops all the way everywhere. And so it's really easy to whack it on things. And, you know, solar panels aren't exactly the most.

• 1:00:33Speaker 05

  They've got things to help with droopy poles.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:00:35Speaker 05

  Viagra.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Coca-Cola. For the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers. For the optimists, pessimists. For long distance love. For introverts and extroverts. The thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new. Coca-Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.

• 1:01:08Speaker 05

  Not sponsored, I don't think.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  You don't think?

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  I don't know. It's the future, man. Who knows?

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  I've been also working on the render farm and I know I've disparaged Linux users before and I will continue to do so. It doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense, you open source bastards. I hate it. I can't even log into my NAS from Ubuntu. I tried to install Fedora and it blew up on installation.

• 1:01:35Speaker 05

  My render?

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  And then I then I I installed Fedora's server client and I after the full installation process, I'm greeted with a DOS command prompt and I'm like, I left this behind in 1994. My commander. So, uh, yeah, I'm doing that because the alternative is Windows Server and I don't know if you know how much Windows Server costs, but it can cost upwards of, uh, $7,000 per license.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Per lo- do you need a license per machine that's on it?

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  So you don't necessarily need that one and I don't know if that includes multiple licenses for multiple computers, but it's like with servers, I have many small versions of it and I don't know what, I don't know any of it, but I know that Linux is free, so I don't have to deal with that. But also it's That's Dracula? Oh, I love Count Dracula. Blah, blah. I auditioned for the movie, you think if we get in?

• 1:02:32Speaker 03

  It's like a Christopher Nolan drag, like we're going for dark and gritty. Dracula's been through a lot and whenever you're ready.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  I'm Dracula.

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

  Jared Leto as Dracula.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Uh, so my small talk is the same as it's always ever been is just about the render farm. I have solved water cooling.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Wow. Don't talk about globus saltz again. Don't go there.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Why not? I don't need to right now. Right now I don't because it's winter, so I don't need to worry about cooling too much. Water cooling is a lot like factorial. I was just playing that last night. Yeah, I know, right? So factorial is about like optimizing your your distribution and automating things so that it all flows in a good direction and and you know, you can get clogs in your factorial factory because you can have things going and then it won't go out. You have an into an out and an out to an in and it needs the belts need to be perfect and and also you don't need extraneous belts because you'll run out of space and stuff like that, right? So water cooling has always been a very scary part of computer building to me and I've never done it because I always worry about catastrophically exploding my computers. With water. To be honest, I did that the first time, I think I told you guys, the first time

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  I did, I had to put it outside and drain it. Well, that's just because I didn't know what kind of plug I was using. It was an inset plug or a side plug. I've now successfully water cooled eight servers.

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  Damn.

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  I'm really proud of that. I've, I've got custom blocks. Well, I didn't make them, but the blocks for the CPUs. I put them in there. I created my own routing with the loop inside a very elegant way of like the tight angles and stuff like that. Because if you go to a server manufacturer and you buy their proprietary water cooling solution, it's thousands of dollars, thousands of dollars. But the block I got is 60 bucks, right? So 60 bucks for that, 60 bucks for another one. And then the pieces, the connectors are like five bucks a piece. You need dozens of them. You need way more than you'd ever think. And if you get the quick disconnects, they get pricier, but I did it all and it works. And I set up the, the quick disconnects properly so that if I ever need to do maintenance, I pop them out, no water goes anywhere.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Like dry brakes, you mean like?

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah. So they're, they're just like couple and they uncouple really easily. Uh, so I pop all those out. The only thing that I didn't, I don't understand is there is some liquid physics going on that don't make any sense to me. Because I know the general principle is like, you need to put the fluid in when you're filling it. And then air rises to the highest point in there and it'll, you know, you want to vent that. So you can always fill it. So you want where you're filling it to be the highest point and then it goes down. But what they don't tell you, well, they probably do, but I didn't read it, is the way the, the loops can sit and go up and down. Also create like many high and low points in the loop. It's like the false vacuum thing in the universe where they say, we're resting at what we think is the base point.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  But actually we're going to all collapse into nothingness. And so what happens with that is pressure can start to build up explosively inside these tubes. I haven't had anything explode, except where I was filling it in so many times. It's like old faithful. I watch as it goes in, I see an air pocket come back up and it sounds, it sounds like it's rumbling. And I have to put my finger over the thing or else it's going to push water up from behind it. Before the air gets there. So I push that. And then once I look at the tube and I see the air is like filtered to the top, then I let it go and goes. It's just like, it's a very strange, it doesn't feel like building computers at all.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  It feels like a, it feels like I'm a car mechanic, just like trying to cobble together the system. It's very fun and water is going every, I've ran through so many rolls of paper towels. I've lost more fluid than I've put into the thing, but not in the computers.

• 1:06:22Speaker 05

  You've probably spent thousands of dollars on this.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  On the parts?

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  No, I was joking.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:06:29Speaker 05

  I'm at like negative 10 points to start this episode. It's not a great start for me.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  No, come on. It was funny, man. I laughed.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  I thought it was very funny. I was just being respectful and being quiet.

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  We love this episode. We love this episode.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  I've not even done anything.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  I've never built custom water loop stuff, but I've watched lots of videos on it. That's, that's very funny. Well, so you have dry brakes. So you could use like a, like a pick or something to sort of like open the dry brake and bleed the air from your little pockets that you have probably.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  I could, I just worry about breaking any kind of O-ring or seal inside there or jamming a mechanic or mechanism in there. And then suddenly I got like.

• 1:07:06Speaker 05

  Oh, O-ring brake. No.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  Do you have trauma about O-rings?

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  Probably they make like a dry bleed connection, like dry brake bleeder where it's like you can connect it to the dry brake and it's the right connection, but then it's just a bleeder that opens to the atmosphere or something.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  I bet they do. One of the problems with water cooling is that there's so many different manufacturers. There's so many different standards of parts. Most of the tubing that I do is 13, is 10, 13. It's 10 millimeters inner diameter, 13 millimeters outer diameter. Most of the actual threaded screw holes are quarter inch. Some things are very standardized, but all of them are tiny itty bitty parts that cost like five bucks a piece. And so you're like, oh, it's cheap. Oh, man, I need 96 of these.

• 1:07:50Speaker 05

  I wasn't wrong by adding up to thousands of dollars. It sounds like by the end of this.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  It does, but when you think of the server thing, it's, it's like thousands of dollars per actual server on the rack. So that it adds up way quicker for there. And in the end, you would still have to hook it all up and get other stuff. So it works out to be cheaper, but it's, there's something very fun to it. It's like, it's the exact same difference. Of buying your own computer and building, buying your own parts and building your computer or buying a pre-made computer.

• 1:08:17Speaker 05

  What if you buy your own parts, have someone else build your computer?

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  That's costs money unless I do it and then I do it for free.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  Unless you trick Mark into doing it.

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  Hey, you guys want to come over?

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. No, I felt very cool because I had a pressure tester. So whenever I would build the loop, I would have a pressure tester, plug up one and put the pressure test, pump air in to test for leaks. It felt very, it felt very official. I felt very confident doing it and it was actually really fun. I haven't, I don't work with my hands a lot and I don't know, something about wrestling the pressure was very fun and super frustrating and sometimes, but very fun.

• 1:08:54Speaker 05

  Good work. I listened. I paid attention.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Thanks. I have a disaster.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  Oh, go on.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  So, you know, on the last episode, I was saying that my render farm is working.

• 1:09:08Speaker 03

  I don't want to ruin the illusion for people, but you mean, you mean like 40 minutes ago?

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Like you bragged about how your render farm was working.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  I said it in there because I knew that if I got into it, it would be a longer thing. So I didn't want that to be part of it. It has not been going as good as I may have suggested it was going.

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  Uh huh. Oh, no.

• 1:09:36Speaker 05

  Go on.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  This is an issue that me and there's, there's an IT guy that's helping me out with setting some of it up. He's doing more of the like the software side, getting things to actually arranged in that capacity. And so one of the persistent problems is a server that I bought, which is a density, like a high density server, it's four nodes in like a two unit thing. They're long, but it's meant to cram as much process power into small pieces as possible. The issue with that is not in me putting it together. It's not in the water cooling that I have set up because in the compact space, you need water cooling or else it's going to overheat. They're so crammed in there and so you need an extra water cooling solution. All that works, but after all that work that I've put in and I've probably put in like a hundred, 200 hours into just setting up those parts of it.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  With all the water cooling pieces in there, there's still a persistent performance problem. The chips themselves are fine. They come back and they all the checks come together. But what it's boiled down to is the specific server brand that it is has not put out an update to the chipset for those processors. And that's just something that is, I don't know if there's a way to just go directly to the Intel makes the processors and go like, hey, you got drivers, give them to me. Or if it's something where you have to kind of like, figure out a way to program it in yourself. You gotta get the chipset drivers from the manufacturer of the processor and then they integrate with the board and, but there's a problem. The longer you use them, the more the performance just starts to go.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  And then eventually it locks up so bad, you can't use it.

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  How long is this? Like if you do it for a couple of days or is this like?

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  10 minutes, 15 minutes is about the time it starts.

• 1:11:15Speaker 03

  That's not long enough.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  That's not long enough to do.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  I was like, yeah, you could just reset it every night.

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  So I thought this would have resolved. I've done like BIOS updates. I've done, you know, firmware updates. I've done every update that I can that is provided by the manufacturer of the server. The end result, I think, and I'm in communication to like, do a big return, is to do a different server platform. There's another company. And I'm not naming any of them because I don't know if one works or not. Okay, Asus servers, I'm going to say are the ones that are not working right now in this specific use case. They have worked in other things that I've done before, Asus or whatever it's called. And so Gigabyte makes an equivalent product that has also the hyper dense four unit thing. But I have to undo all the water cooling. I literally have to unbuild everything I've built to pull it out of the computers,

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  box those back up, return these giant 100 pound gigantic boxes, and then get new ones in and rebuild all the bullshit all over again, which took me, oh, days, weeks.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  This sounds like the kind of server I wouldn't leave a tip, and I always leave a tip.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Give them a point. Just checking.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  All right, all right, all right. Mark said so.

• 1:12:27Speaker 05

  Have you thought about talking to the server's manager?

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  I am the manager.

• 1:12:32Speaker 05

  That sucks, though. That really sucks.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  It's a big pain in the ass because as far as I know, it should work. They read fine. When they're working, the performance is exactly where it should be. All is lining up. It's not overheating. I even thought that it might have been one of the peripheral components in the server overheating. At one point, I had a graphics card in there, a very small, compact one. I took that out because I thought it was overheating. Apparently, it was not the problem either, and no other peripheral in there because the fans are very loud. I do the water cooling also to try to quiet it down a bit. They're running at full bore and still just crashing. I think it's just because the chipset is not updated to run with those processors. There's some kind of paging, file system, memory system error that's building up over time that's causing like consecutive errors that run into each other. And then eventually it freezes.

• 1:13:18Speaker 05

  That one's a little, eh, sucks.

• 1:13:21Speaker 03

  Nope, nope, no.

• 1:13:22Speaker 05

  I give myself one for whatever that's worth.

• 1:13:24Speaker 02

  But anyway, so that's the latest. It's not all sunshine roses, but half of the other render farm is still working. It's just those hyper dense ones that are not working, which are the most recent addition. And it's, it's something I can return. It's just like, that's ours. I don't have. Not devastating, but it's unfortunate. Just means I gotta undo a lot of work and redo it.

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  But it'll probably be fine. Once you redo it, it'll probably work then.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, it probably will, maybe, but I do know that the Gigabyte servers do have a late, a more recent BIOS update than Asus did. Asus's last BIOS update is not only last year, but it's like mid last year. Whereas Gigabyte has a BIOS update that you can apply to the server as of earlier this year, which is after the processors actually launched. So I know that the old BIOS is not, is not current as of the processor's release date. And these ones on the other server are. So ideally that should work because the processors are fine.

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  Probably.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  I never thought I'd be a truck guy. I got a Ford F-150 Lightning because I looked at the specs of what it could do in terms of power delivery. The size of the battery is way bigger than the Teslas ever were. The range is not a lie. Those Teslas all lie about their range. It's it. It just blew my mind. I would watch it and I would go like, I've traveled 10 miles. Well, surely the, oh, it's dropped 30 miles. All right, well, that's fine. It said I had like a 300 mile range on my Tesla. I got 180 at best, even when I was driving like this. It's just lies, but this one I drive 10 miles and it's like the range estimate only dropped eight. And I'm like, oh, thank you. Oh, thank you.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  Now, hold on. The Tesla wasn't lying. Someone took the road signs and spread them out further. That wasn't the Tesla's fault. It's crazy because this truck has a 240 volt plug in the back of it. I could run my render farm off of this truck. This truck has more power than all of my backup batteries that I put in my render farm by three times.

• 1:15:28Speaker 05

  I want to see a Ford commercial with like a really nerdy dude driving his Ford Lightning with the render farm. He's like off roading in the mud through the woods while like video game let's plays are like processing in the back.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  I I could. I'm good. I have an update on my many hobbies.

• 1:15:47Speaker 03

  Which one is it? 3D guns?

• 1:15:50Speaker 05

  3D guns.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  Ammo farm? Where are we going?

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Look, it's about the render farm. It's been working delightfully, finally, after four floor air conditioners, two wall air conditioners. That some bitch is actually staying at a steady temperature. Uh, but the harsh realities of operating a render farm.

• 1:16:10Speaker 05

  You built a freezer?

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  It's not that cold, man, even with all those. I woefully underestimated how much cooling was necessary. Uh, but I have another problem entirely. I got my power bill.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:16:29Speaker 05

  Did the seven air conditioners raise it slightly?

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  It's been up and down because we've been testing it, but we haven't been running it. So the past month has been the first time it's been like running every day, chugging, you know, beautiful renders.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  My power bill was $3,000.

• 1:16:52Speaker 03

  Is your solar working or?

• 1:16:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:17:02Speaker 05

  I bet you wish you were a man with five ovens instead of a man with seven air conditioners now, don't you? I opened up that letter. You know how they show a bar graph of your like monthly usage?

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:14Speaker 05

  It was like, oh, and it's trending up as I'm testing. And then this past month of just astronomically.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  Somehow it like comically goes off the paper. You just look at it just like you're like, what the fuck?

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  I don't know what the power company thinks is going on at this place. Um, you know, this place being a bathroom.

• 1:17:34Speaker 05

  You're gonna get raided by SWAT for a render farm.

• 1:17:37Speaker 03

  Dude, yeah, no, DEA is gonna show up and be like, uh, the power company thinks there's a grow farm here or something, something crazy is happening. So it must be drugs.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  Oh, there's a farm.

• 1:17:48Speaker 05

  You're gonna find seven 3D printers, a server farm, seven AC units and a bunch of 2D guns.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  It's like a big wooden crate with like the rack in it and then just a bunch of pieces of paper with hand drawn AKs on it.

• 1:18:01Speaker 05

  This man's planning to raid the Looney Tunes. I got a gun safe and they're like, open this safe. I'm like, all right, I'll open it quickly. And just an avalanche of papers, you know, mask style with all the dollars coming out.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  For some reason, they all have hand drawn serial numbers, but then their hands scratched out.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, that's my update and it's only going to, it not gonna go down much in the next few months.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  So they didn't say anything about that though. Cause like I, when we lived out there, we had, there was one summer where, uh, the really, one of the really bad fire summers happened and I like, we had all of our shit closed and sealed and we were running the AC just to try and keep positive pressure on our house because it was like toxic outside. And our bill jumped by like 250% and the power company sent the bill and then they called and we're like, are you guys okay? Are you good? And I was like, yeah, there's fires and shit. Like, I don't know. It's been awful, but they, no one, they just saw your bill and we're like, all right.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Well, if they did call, I didn't answer. But yeah, I feel like they're probably more um more into that.

• 1:19:10Speaker 05

  They're gonna think you're a render dealer and call you El Servo.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  I had this idea a long time ago, before I started building it, a long time ago, it feels like a long time ago, like a year ago. Cause with the Mac Studios, Apple's silicon, it's very power efficient. And I did some paper math that was like the power efficiency of this cost over a period of time. The cost of this like computer going on eBay and finding random stuff. And the math showed me a year ago that the ah the power cost of the actual server grade stuff would be astronomically high. And I'm like, I must be doing my math wrong. That can't be right. And now here I am. My math was right.

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  Congratulations.

• 1:19:54Speaker 05

  Oh, dude, thirty six thousand a year on power. You're saving so much.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  My yearly power bill is gonna be thirty six thousand dollars.

• 1:20:03Speaker 05

  Good math. I can tell you.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  It's okay. You're getting that back because the server farm is very profitable, I assume.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  Oh, well, technically it's saving me money. Technically, I think I'm deep. I think I'm deep in the red. I've like, I don't want to go and do the math. I don't want to. It would have been so much better if I just hired another company. Got them. I, oh, man. Oh, man.

• 1:20:25Speaker 05

  You factor in maintenance cost, I'm sure you're gonna be well into the green.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  Well, maintaining it, I'm not hoping to do that. I'm hoping that when it dies, it dies and I will just. Cause there's no company I can send it back to. I've got it from eBay. So and and it's not like I don't think I can sell it back again.

• 1:20:43Speaker 05

  So you spent a year working on this, getting it to work. You installed seventy air conditioning units, you're paying three thousand a month. And your idea is.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  When it dies, it dies. I I even now, I'm like buying a whole, a room full of Mac Studios might have been the better option.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  How much globber salt do you need for it to die in a tragic globber salt accident?

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Uh, very little. If I go by that one guy on Reddit, it's a thought of what I was gonna do, which was shove globber salt. Inside the computers and immerse them. So very little. Anyway, sorry, I gotta gotta weep a little bit here.

• 1:21:18Speaker 05

  I understand. I would too. If I had a $3,000 power bill.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I actually in in the in the past two days since we last talked, I did a full redo of my whole render farm. If I take a picture of it afterwards, because I didn't take a picture of it during it, I'll send it to the editors if I remember. Lot of conditions. This is never gonna happen. No one's ever gonna see this.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  Editors, invent a render farm. Make it look awesome.

• 1:21:45Speaker 02

  It does. It still has some wires across the floor just because of where the electricians put in plugs and the fact that it is a bathroom. But it's a lot cleaner now. It works a lot better. It turns out if you don't shove something up against your your air conditioners that you've put in, it's able to breathe and circulate air better. So give those room to breathe. Everything's going. I got the leaning tower of Mac Studios. It's great.

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  What's that mean?

• 1:22:09Speaker 05

  When I picture your render farm, don't take offense to this. I picture C3PO after he got ripped apart and is like in the backpack. For all the pieces are there, but there's wires and he's like heads on backwards.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  That's how it was before. Have you? Did you? Did I not show you a picture of the before? I'm pretty sure I did. It's a dystopian. It was a dystopian cyberpunk kind of nonsense thing. If I type server into my phones like pictures, it doesn't come up. And I'm like, why wouldn't that come up? I was like, oh, yeah, because it doesn't look anything like what they would think a server looks like.

• 1:22:41Speaker 03

  What do you? What's the search term to find that picture? Post-apocalyptic nightmare, rat's nest of wires and oh, there it is.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  Let me look up apocalypse. Oh, no results. Okay. Uh, nest of wires.

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  Rat King. Let me look up Rat King. Nope. Yeah, man, I can't find this. It's a mystery.

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  Apple Intelligence, my booty.

• 1:23:06Speaker 05

  Well, it's working great after the rebuild, right? No issues?

• 1:23:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you rebuilt it and then nothing has gone wrong and it worked perfectly the whole time.

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  Kind of. It's it's not my fault. Of course not. No, I can't find the picture. Oh, no.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  Anyway, it's, it's good, except one of the things that I dislike is these small like arbitrary details about computers that you know, you have to really read the manuals to know or read in depth about reviews and anything. I'm sure a bunch of people know that if you need to populate all of the RAM slots for server grade hardware to run at full performance, it needs all the channels filled. It's expecting that. So for a while, these have been running with almost all of them full, but not all of them for the ones that have RAM slots.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  You can't skip any slots and or?

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  No. Yeah. It's, uh, it's probably is common knowledge in the server world, but I didn't know this because I'm used to like running a PC for desktop reasons. And sometimes for PCs, if you have only half of them filled, it runs faster. So it's very opposite thinking. Um, but whatever. Doesn't matter. Not important. Goddamn IT will be the death of me because for some reason those management ports just decided to die. They, they're plugged in just the same. They were plugged in before from one switch, put them into another switch, reset everything, reboot everything, and then just never picks up an IP address. Just cannot do anything. I

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  don't get it. I don't understand how this stuff is supposed to be smart, redundant, fail safe. It just, oh no, another, another plug. I can't do it on different server. I think it's probably because I didn't let go of the fixed IP on the previous device before I moved it over, but I've done that before where devices just pick up. Anyway, it's, it's a nightmare.

• 1:25:00Speaker 03

  I know that you know that you could pay someone to do that, but there's a part of my brain that would love to see you like, like find an IT consultant or something and be like, I just need you to come. I have the setup and they walk into your bathroom and they're just like.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, no. Oh, and like they're like pull out their laptop and plug in and they're like looking through the software. They're just like, oh, God, I'm sure it's fine, but I'm sure a professional would there. There's even people who build PC like just towers. There's so much shit that if they looked at the way I did it, and I think I do it. I mean, it works. I've never had a PC that didn't work. Got all the specs I wanted out of it. They would still probably just vomit out their entire lungs at what I did. I can only imagine for server shit, what kind of things there are that you would have no idea about.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  There actually is a guy with Burning Tractor, which is the VFX company I work with. They have this guy Rory there, who is their IT guy. And so he, he has worked miracles for never actually stepping foot inside the server room. But every time I do something, I swear to God, he's, I see on Discord that Rory is typing, stop Rory is typing, stop Rory is, and I know it's like, stop fucking it up, you fucking delete, delete. I know that's what's going on. I know he's doing that. But, you know, what could he do?

• 1:26:24Speaker 05

  Well, I think that's very relatable. We've all been there with our server farms.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  I think we've all been there with fucking up networking. I mean, I miss the days when it was just like you have your modem from the, the, the internet company and I still managed to fuck that up. So what was I thinking having a whole farm?

• 1:26:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it doesn't make me feel good that you're doing all this shit and it's, this is pretty high tech stuff and it's a complicated system with lots of different, and I, I have felt exactly the way that you feel, but it's been me on my home wifi with a modem and a router and like one smart device being like, oh no, I connected you to the, you were on the wifi and now you forgot. And like, but it's just me with like one light bulb being like, why won't you be blue? Fucking light bulb. But it doesn't make me feel good that I've been there, but with, you know, kind of a different scale of technology, kind of different, but it's all just like that, man.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  It's weirdly applicable because the things I've learned are actually like in the IT world, they're like Common knowledge for, oh no, there he goes. He had it with our tech talk.

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  Wade speaks for the subreddit.

• 1:27:35Speaker 02

  Uh, but it's common knowledge, apparently in IT land, but you know, if you want your home network to work better, virtual networks are the way. You create a sub-network just for your devices and internet of things. And then you create specific rules that those connect to each other and then to your other virtual network where you operate your normal internet connection. So it's separated and you don't have any cross-traffic from that one in your network.

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  What the fuck are you talking about?

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't, don't do it. I tried to, I tried to do a VLAN. I took down my whole network for two days.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:28:06Speaker 02

  I don't, don't touch the VLAN button.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  It's not, I'm not going to. Uh, there's a part of me that's like, oh, that would be so sick though. Cause then there wouldn't, no, it would not be sick. It would be hurra, it would be awful. It would be like taking another full-time 40-hour-a-week job at a thing I don't know how to do. And I don't need that in my life.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  What I should do is I should, uh, render a 3D model of his basement and use my render farm to simulate poop water explode. I wish.

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  You've got really good at making the ocean go psh.

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  I know, but using my computing power to make those infographics, like, you know, news documentaries are like discovery till shit. They have a 3D rendering of what's happening. Wait, I'm gonna make a 3D rendering of your basement and I'm gonna show just poop water, just oof, and, and you just like, oh, you know?

• 1:28:54Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  What, what was the noise, Wade?

• 1:28:57Speaker 05

  Well, shit is on the move out there, but thankfully it's just Molly cleaning up after the cat.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  Okay. I would have phrased that differently. Shit is on the move out there. Thankfully it's just Molly. But you know so many things. You've done so much cool stuff.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  I bear, apparently I don't even know the beginnings of it because my, my, my render farm is very powerful, but it still isn't woefully under, like, you know, at the Nvidia CEO, what he's talking about? The more you buy, the more you save with his $10,000 graphics cards. While he's, he's hawking a, a server rack that's as big as, bigger than the shelf behind me, that probably cumulatively in the whole rack costs like $10 million. And that's just to go really fast.

• 1:29:44Speaker 05

  You need a render cooperative or a render collective farm.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  What? What is that?

• 1:29:50Speaker 05

  A group of farms.

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  Those are types of farms.

• 1:29:56Speaker 02

  You're talking like a ground plowing kind of farm and a co-op kind of deal.

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  What a name that would be, though.

• 1:30:02Speaker 05

  The Render Collective.

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

  This is my render cooperative. I have 16 garages each stacked with.

• 1:30:09Speaker 03

  Every bathroom in every building I have access to stuffed full of stuffed full of servers.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  I have a man with 10 garages of render farm. I have some tech complaints, but you know, those are always hit or miss.

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  I love when Mark moans about technology and so does everyone on the subreddit universally.

• 1:30:27Speaker 02

  All right, so I do have a few complaints.

• 1:30:30Speaker 03

  Okay, okay.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  I had another fiber line pull to my render farm, right? You know, how basic do I need to break this down? Line of fiber. Damn.

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  Are you asking me or Wade?

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  If anyone has an objective.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  It's a line the internet comes in on and goes out on.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  For a lot of people, actually not as many as there should be. Most people have cable, which is still copper cable.

• 1:30:55Speaker 03

  Everyone's internet touches fiber optic at some point. It just usually there's a junction at some point where it switches from your hard line to your fiber optic. But yeah, it's the internet. It's the fast kind.

• 1:31:06Speaker 02

  So you can get your own fiber going between your. So you could set up your, your whole house networking with fiber if you really wanted to, you could do that. And it would be very fast, efficient networking. It's just that they're very fragile.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  And you hated having money in your bank account.

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And you, if any rat even touches a wire, they'll crack it in half or they'll nibble on it and show, oh, internet's gone. Oh, an actual rat. I thought you meant like a really shitty person.

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  Any of you fucking rats touch my wires.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  I see two paths for you who heads up in my ceiling.

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  I'm gonna rule you with fear or I'm gonna rule you with love and you're not gonna like that. Anyway, so anyway, I started shooting my ceiling.

• 1:31:47Speaker 02

  Fiber, I had it too, because I wanted a redundancy because there's, there's a single connection going to my render farm right now. And if that breaks, then no one can use it or I have to go in there, but there's no computer setup in there. It's all remote access, right? So if that breaks, even I can't use it because I, hell, my computers are, you know, I access it remotely.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  So I had another fiber. And pulled and this one I was like, I want hundred gigabit lines. Hundred gigabit. Cause I was like,

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  Okay, I'm sure that was cheap to install.

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  Well, it's actually not that much more. The, the most of the cost is in laying the, the conduit and pulling it through.

• 1:32:24Speaker 05

  I guess that's fair.

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  The, the cable may cost like twice as much per foot or something like that, but still most of the work is in the labor of getting it from A to B. So they did it. I had them dig it really nice and the, the whole pipe and then, you know, it gets all said and done. And I go to the server closet and I look at the cable and I'm like, pick up the other cable that they put in this 10 gigabit one and I hold him up next to it. So I'm like, fuck.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  It's, they pulled two cables through this fucking enormous thing. And they're not hundred. Anyway, so that's the only complaint I have about that. And this is more of a complaint with a particular cavity than anything, but it's like, I'll say this thing, I'll say these things. And like the people that you'll come to the house, cause it's like a house and they're like, and I'll say, I want a hundred gigabit and they're like, you know, nobody needs hundred gig, that's crazy.

• 1:33:21Speaker 05

  I want a jillion gigabits, this guy.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  Oh, a billion. Okay. Yeah. All right. And so they're like, I'll just pull this fiber, which is perfect.

• 1:33:29Speaker 05

  At this point, you have like three government satellites aimed at your house at all.

• 1:33:33Speaker 02

  Probably, probably. I have, I have an unbelievable amount of random bullshit going on here and to confirm.

• 1:33:39Speaker 05

  They said the bear.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, the bear. Yeah, the bear could fuck things up real fast. Anyway, I was just like, God, I, I just wish people would take me seriously sometimes. Cause I'm saying what I mean. I am, I don't know everything about everything I'm doing. But when I say I want a hundred gigabit and they'll say like, well, you, you need to get really expensive infrastructure to even handle a hundred gigabit. And then I go, I know.

• 1:34:02Speaker 05

  Way ahead of you, dude.

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  But I have it. Plug it into that thing.

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  Anyway. I have a render farm update. It's not gonna be exciting.

• 1:34:18Speaker 05

  I'll take a nap immediately.

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  So in my experience, I have had many ups and downs with the render farm, especially in terms of like, how to get the computers in there, what format? And I'm circling back to this crazy thing that's gonna make a lot of people mad.

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  Glower salts.

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  No, no, no. Don't even need it. I've, I've very much become like no water cooling at all. Unless it's like an all in one, and even then I would rather have an air cooler because it's just going to be consistent. At least I guess that the fan fails, but usually you can have two on them.

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  I was so proud of my ability to go on eBay and find these crate Wade. Nah, it's fine. I was so proud of my ability to go on eBay, you know, much like the Cincinnati Bengals.

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  I was just gonna write a sign that said Wade loses a point for every minute he sleeps while Mark talks. So it's good that you woke up.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  Anyway, so I did not know this, but you know, the Intel chip that everyone seemed to not review very well that I've been like, it's actually very good. They make a workstation grade motherboard for that, that takes error correcting RAM. And it's the same fucking price as a normal, well, in a high end, but a high end, normal desktop motherboard. And why this is huge is error correcting RAM is very important on a server, especially if we're running a long time. It's because when it's doing calculations that are very precise and needs to not have wrong numbers in the memory. That leads to bad issues. And it's, there's a lot of reasons why it would happen, why it doesn't happen, but error correcting RAM corrects it. And so it makes it really, really uncommon for those to happen.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  But it's also stupendously cheaper than the, even the discounted server hardware I was getting online. It is stupendous and it's more power efficient and it's like, and I look at it, I'm like, fucking thinking with this stupid render farm. So yeah, um, I'm going to be overhauling it because now that iron lung is wrapping up, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get it out of my bathroom. I'm gonna get it out of the bathroom and then I'm gonna move it so that it could be, cause it was always a stopgap. It was. Always like this is urgent. I gotta do this right here in this bathroom. There's no other place to do it. Apparently, and then, um, you know, then one thing led to another, but I'm going to be moving it on the sell and stuff and then I'm going to

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  convert it to a much more optimized streamlined. And this is once again where I'm like, people like, again, you just don't be loyal to AMD or Intel. Buy what is useful in the moment. And holy shit, I can like, they're so discounted because no one wants to get them because the two frames per second, it gets less than the other one. Who cares? It is such a good productivity chip. It's so good. I'm doing overhaul to that. So I've got some computer parts coming in.

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  Well, that's fun.

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  It's very fun. I'm, I've already sold a couple of things, um, back. So technically I'm up, except I paid for them before. So I'm

• 1:37:17Speaker 00

  Coca-Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, pessimists for long distance love. For introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for old friends and new. Coca-Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  But you got that money back. Full price, I'm sure.

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  Yo, yeah. Oh, yeah. Man, people are tearing apart my render farm on, on like the server at home lab. People are really not.

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  And I shared the picture because I know it's bad, guys. I know. Oh, wait, that was real? That was a real picture?

• 1:38:07Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  Uh, no, that's it. It's just like, look, guys, it was a, I, I learned as I went. It's not pretty, but fuck, it works. Look, guys, it works. Yeah, that shit fucking flies. And people need to understand, it's not just for like rendering video or encoding video. That's not what it's for. It's not even just for rendering the CG scenes, which can do very well. It's purpose built for distributed simulations. Simulations need a lot of compute power and to do it efficiently, this is the best way that I've gotten so far to do it. It's not the best way ever. It's the best way I could manage myself. And let me tell you, all those people out there, they were like, why didn't he hire a professional to do this? I tried. They came in and I said, yeah, I want to put a server in my bathroom and then they go.

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  Fuck you. And they leave. They don't do it. They don't do it. So yeah, that's it. So my, my childhood thing actually that I do still to this day is something that I, I, I cultivated again because I was building the render farm. And I know that sounds weird, but my dad always had computers every, ever since I was a kid. And so for a very long time, I was the type that was like, he, he got computer magazines. He got like the Micro Center Mall, like advertisement thing. And so I would, after he was done with that, I would go through and look like, oh, yes, I'll take a thousand dollar hard drive. Hmm. 30, you know, this five year old me is like, oh, yeah.

• 1:39:34Speaker 03

  A 30 megabyte hard drive.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  Whoa. Oh, a 10 pack of floppies for only $29.99. Well, I'll take two, you know. So now that I'm, I'm, I'm back in building render farm and I'm done with the movie now. So I, I now I'm just like, what computer can I upgrade? What needs an upgrade? Like I caught a whiff that there were new Intel processor processors coming out and it's like, oh yeah, all right, I probably need that. I probably, I probably could do with an upgrade to my main computer. I could build another one. You want to build another one? So it's just like, I'm just desperate, desperately looking around for anything that I can build and, and anything that I can tinker. Cause it's just like, it's just tinkering with Legos, but with expensive computer equipment.

• 1:40:16Speaker 03

  You are a great candidate for a hobby I've been trying to teach myself about and I'm too stupid apparently to do very well. Have you looked into HomeLab stuff?

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  I was on the HomeLab subreddit. They were making fun of my render farm.

• 1:40:30Speaker 03

  Oh, they were burning your render, your render farm?

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  Well, some of them were just like, no, wait, actually this is what this subreddit's all about. Really shitty setups. This guy's, you can't make fun of him. And meanwhile, he's saying that I'm like, oh, ow, you, I, look, I'm still getting hit here, man.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Seriously, though, the people on the on the home lab subreddit who are like scoffing at people who scrabble things together and have janky at what is a home lab if it's not supposed to be some janky shit where you're like, I have these weird random components. Let me see what I can make with them. It's great. And the people who are chill about it are cool. The people who are on Reddit about it are not.

• 1:41:08Speaker 05

  That janky shit held the number one movie for seventy one and a half out of seventy two hours.

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's true, baby. It's true. What I will say is about that, some people were looking at all the Mac studios and was like, oh, clearly, that's not a deal. Tell you something about Mac, even if you don't like it, that shit holds its resale value like crazy. And you better believe I'm gonna sell those things now that I'm done with the movie. So I only got them for this for this thing. So.

• 1:41:35Speaker 03

  I cannot fucking believe how expensive like an M one Mac mini still is like you'd think like, oh, that's really old, but it's an Apple silicon chip. And but it's like, oh, that's like a five year old compact computer, like three hundred, four or five hundred bucks, depending on the specs. What it's like, what the fuck? You might as well just buy new stuff. God damn.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  That's the crazy thing is because I bought this. I mean, it was still the AI craze, but then people discovered that, hey, these Macs are actually really good for AI bullshit. And I'm not using it for that. I'm using it for efficient rendering. But the resale value, I might make money on these.

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  You're gonna make money on some Mac studios.

• 1:42:17Speaker 02

  It's crazy. So the render farm is no more.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Okay, it's a little underwhelming. It's gone.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  I mean, it is big. It is big news, but it's it's gone. I feel like it's been that's just a part of life. Wow.

• 1:42:36Speaker 03

  Why are you acting like you're not listening? Man, I know you hear what we're talking about. I am listening. I'm reacting. Oh, okay.

• 1:42:43Speaker 02

  So yes, the render farm has left the bathroom.

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  Woo.

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  I know. It is a big deal.

• 1:42:51Speaker 03

  And you burned it in a bonfire in your backyard?

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  I covered it in Glaber salt, which, as we know, very flammable, extremely flammable. One of the big problems that everyone is trying to warn me about when I stuffed it inside my servers.

• 1:43:04Speaker 03

  It's hard to get up when you're old.

• 1:43:05Speaker 02

  It's moving to an actual, not a bathroom, like, wait, you all right?

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. This is about me. It's about you. Go on.

• 1:43:13Speaker 02

  Anyway, it's, it's moving to a place that actually should have a render farm, a server room, a real, real deal server room, purpose built specifically for that.

• 1:43:24Speaker 03

  Oh, fuck.

• 1:43:25Speaker 02

  What is happening on his desk? What kind of molemen are tunneling up from his basement floor?

• 1:43:30Speaker 03

  What the fuck is happening?

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

  I just squirted water all over. Well, geez, man, don't do that.

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  I'm really trying to stick with the story of this one. Mark's render farm is going to a real room like a big boy.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  And I'm selling some of it because with the current computer prices and RAM prices, don't give me that face.

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  Very high. Oh, man, you're not lying.

• 1:43:57Speaker 02

  Uh, there's some extra stuff that I think I'll try to sell, might even make some money off of what I got off eBay for that.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  I don't understand what's happening with Wade. I gotta be honest. I'm super distracted right now.

• 1:44:08Speaker 02

  Okay, so my, what I do right now is like, okay, let's say making movies or whatever. It's like making entertainment. That's a lot of different disciplines involved in it. That's why I constantly come out like, oh, I bought a graphics card, boo hoo. You know, I, I built a render farm, boo hoo. You know, Glaber salts, boo hoo, you know, lenses, boo hoo. Does that count of like having a job that requires a bunch of skills?

• 1:44:32Speaker 05

  I mean, technically it's your job, so I can't argue it, but you can never stop.

• 1:44:35Speaker 02

  This is easy. I don't want to stop. I want to slide into my grave.

• 1:44:39Speaker 03

  I don't think he's going to stop.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, slide into my grave, wishing I could do more.

• 1:44:44Speaker 03

  The only time you're ever gonna get Tunis honest is when Mark finds out he has almost exactly one year to live. And at the end of the year, Mark dies.

• 1:44:53Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:44:54Speaker 03

  That's the channel.

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  That's not bad.

• 1:45:01Speaker 04

  Watch new episodes on Spotify.

• 1:45:06Speaker 00

  Coca-Cola. For the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers. For the optimists, pessimists. For long distance love. For introverts and extroverts. The thinkers and the doers. For old friends and new. Coca-Cola. For everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

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