I have a lot of fast computers but what I want most from a machine isn't speed, its quiet.
This was a water cooled, allegedly 'sealed for life'. But they lied, the system they installed required regular top ups which I would have been happy to do if they hadn't told me it wasn't needed. Result, a costly return for repair.
It was also horribly noisy, the automatic fan control never kicked in so all four case fans were on full time. The machine was quickly banished to a spare room next to may office.
After 8 years more-or-less faithful service, Voodoo mk I died. I am currently in the process of House-Elfing the main components.
I pulled everything out of the case and re-used it for my current battlestation:
One consequence of this build is that the CPU is very rarely operating at more than 10% of full capacity. In fact it is very rare that the clock is at full speed. Overclocking the processor is not going to be a priority for a very long time.
The main reason for all that CPU power is to drive my display rig with power to spare. This consists of a central 43" 4K Display flanked by two 30" wings. This configuration was chosen so that the dot pitch of all three match. While the central 4K monitor makes a lot of people jealous, it is actually just a Sharp television and was actually the cheapest monitor I have ever bought ($450).
In theory colour matching is performed by a DataColor Spyder Elite. In practice, the Sharp just doesn't have the color gamut to match well. Which is why I plan to swap it out when the price of IPS or OLED displays comes down to a reasonable level.
Orac is my main file and Web server. It is also the target for many of my programing projects that run on Windows and Unix.
When the machine was first built it was intended to go in the basement and cooling was not a consideration. After a while it migrated to my office and the fan noise started to be an issue.
The first and biggest win in noise reduction was to go into the BIOS and work out how to force the machine to actually use the fan control features on the motherboard. After doing this the case fans stopped turning completely without a notable change in CPU temperature.
This left the CPU fan running which hadn't been noticeable at all before. After a while I decided to replace the CPU fan with the same Noctua cooler I used in VooDoo mk II. This has arrived but hasn't been fitted yet.
The other server in the house is a QNAP 8 bay NAS. It works OK as a NAS but it is utterly useless for any other purpose including running a Git server. I would very much like to be able to decommission Orac and just run the QNAP. But the configuration of the machine seems designed to make that impossible. Just about the only way I think it could be done would be to run a virtual machine and run the services in that.
The machine does run Plex adequately. The main problem being that for some reason, the Plex service crashes when there is a pending update for the firmware. I suspect this has something to do with the QNAP setting a flag to say it is going to restart and the Plex service performing some sort of regular reset to prevent resource leaks mounting up.