Saturday, October 5, 2019

A little bit more power

In my pursuit of juicing up my server to act as my security camera processing box, I decided to pop in an upgraded video card. In theory, if everything goes to plan, this should allow me to encode video and run image processing and ML algorithms much more efficiently than trying to do it on the CPU.

Of course, what I didn't count on when ordering the video card is that it would be too long to fit into the existing case, and that furthermore I would need a new power supply with the right connectors for the auxiliary power inputs on it. Cue another trip to Amazon and...


Now my server is much larger. It's quite nice having so much space inside to work on stuff, for the rare occasions that I'll be digging around in there to work on stuff. The important part is that the RTX2070 card fits inside with room to spare.

Amusingly I went for a 1kw power supply just for the sake of making damn sure I'd have enough dancing pixies to keep the magic smoke contained, and after powering the system on and checking the display on my UPS, I'm only using about 100w at idle. I think I've got a little headroom left over.

Now I just have to get all the software to actually talk with the video card. Also peel off the protective plastic once I shove it into its final location in my crafts room.

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