Alder Lake Build

[rbjtech 4276]

A few people wanted me to document my LONG overdue Alder Lake build - so here is a quick write up.

It's not overly exciting - but may give a few ideas on what's involved.

I'm restricted to a 550mm deep server chassis - as my rack is wall mounted, thus it's a bit of a tight fit with a full sized ATX board.

The old 'server' was a mini ATX case on it's side with all the 5.25" bays removed to accommodate the three 5 x 3.5" HDD Enclosures  ..

This ran a Intel i5 750 (yes Gen 1) with 12Gb Memory for the last 6 or 7 years, on 24x7 .. so time for an upgrade as it was struggling. 

Upgrade :-

Intel i7 12700K with 64Gb (went with DDR4), 2Tb NVME

Case is a servercase.co.uk SC-43550B

All HDD bays are stripped out, meaning I can just insert the 3 x enclosures without getting out the Dremel .. 

Prep the PSU and cables to run under the motherboard (to be as neat as possible, there is no hidden cable tray on a server case .. )

On the Corsair modular PSU, you get nice flat cables which allows you to neatly bend then to right angles ..

 

Mobo main power (90 degree adapter to keep the wires neat..) and 12v power installed (under the mobo)

The case did come with a fan wall - but I removed it in the end as I had no need for it - nor did I have any room for it .. 

 

These are the main storage pool controllers - three - 4 x SATA3 PCIe x1 - so each have 5Gbps each - plenty of throughput for the disk enclosures (4 per enclosure)

I also used 3 of the onboard (intel) controllers for the 5th disk in each enclosure (higher performance) and the other 3 of the onboard - 1 for an SSD (emby Cache) and 2 'spare'.

Main OS storage is a 2Tb Samsung NVME sitting under that heatsink next to the 16x PCIe slot.

Cabling looks reasonable given each disk is individually cabled (15 hot swap HDD's + 1 SSD, 2 spares)

The enclosures are Dual Molex powered, so each one gets it's own run from the modular PSU.

Enclosure fans (9W 60mm Nidec 35mm DEEP industrial fans.. hence the finger guards!) blow air OUT the front of the case.

CPU cooling is a Dual 120mm Artic setup - temps even under full load are about 70 Degrees, so perfectly good enough.  Idle is mid 20's.

It's still on the bench atm (haha) but it should go in the rack just fine - I'll have to change the centre drive labels around as I had to put the enclosure in upside down to make the cables reach ..

No graphics card as there is zero need for it - QSV in Emby absolutely flies - I'll do a separate thread for this, as to be perfect honest, I'm astonished how quick it is (~1000 fps to an SD transcode!)  

Any questions, feel free to shout.

edit - other random pics I forgot to annotate .. 

Edited November 22, 2021 by rbjtech

[chef 3746]

A thing of beauty!

[Cheesegeezer 3087]

Thanks for sharing, that is a monster setup!! I need this in my life lol  

[neik 837]

Nice build indeed.

What's your available internet speed?

[rbjtech 4276]

1 hour ago, neik said:

Nice build indeed.

What's your available internet speed?

400 Mb/sec d/l, 40 Mb/sec u/l.  I don't run the f/w vm on this new box through, I use dedicated (non vm) hardware for that.

Edited November 24, 2021 by rbjtech

[Dibbes 431]

I love this!!! It's beautiful!!!

My SO does not agree and has already threatened me with physical violence if I would build something like this... lol

[Barwell1992 1]

Long shot on an old post but did you have any clearance issues with the cpu cooler and the case side? 
 

I’ve got one of these cases on order but no idea what clearance it has for the cooler. 

[rbjtech 4276]

On 25/02/2023 at 22:42, Barwell1992 said:

Long shot on an old post but did you have any clearance issues with the cpu cooler and the case side? 
 

I’ve got one of these cases on order but no idea what clearance it has for the cooler. 

Yep I did - it was about 2mm short 

So I just put some 2mm pieces of plastic on the sides of the lid and raised it up a fraction.

It largely depends on the cooler heatpipes though - they are the bits which cause the problem.