Congratulations on the latest badge additions team. Some incredible milestones have been reached.

Hope everyone is keeping well in these strange times?

Yes the QL1K ES are all engineering samples, very cheap and very reliable. 14nm so not quite as efficient as the latest 7nm AMD offerings but the vector microcode goes some way to making that up at least for BOINC. I highly recommend and I think Intel wouldn't mind their non-retail chips being used for WCG.

You should've asked months ago when he had 10 nodes at that price. I was too scared to commit to more than one, wish I'd bought them all
Yes I spent ages researching heat-sinks and settled on some solid copper ones from China. Here's the last one I'm selling on ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/133524447166
just accepted an offer on it, is it you?
However if you're running only 2 nodes you can use 2u heatsinks, think I got mine from Scan for less than £30 and it includes a carrier clip. The Chinese ones meant I had to buy a bunch of clips, which I'm now slowly selling on ebay.
I did try liquid cooling but it's expensive and the set-up I had was leaky, I had two of these bad boys, if I was more confident with liquid cooling I'd have re-done the piping properly but didn't want to risk the warranty so just returned them.
https://www.dynatron.co/product-page/l13
PSU I got from a German company, Genuine G10 96% very pricey but efficient.

No worries on the sharing, seems I've got an eye for a bargain (Scottish roots). Also I love the research and playing around with kit as I think most of us do.
I'd been running QL1K's in one PC for 3 years now on a Supermicro X11DPH-T but they're about 600 a board so when I saw each node for 240 (with nic's) I couldn't say no. For reference my total build was Heatsinks 62, Carrier Clips 10, CPU 343, Node 240, chassis 360, 32gb ECC 46, PSU 143, so just shy of £1200 which I thought was ok as it's got space for 3 more nodes, sadly by the time I was happy with it running in the garage there was no more for sale. So it doesn't make much sense for 1 node now. I'll see if any pop up on the market but TBH will probably list it again in the spring, you can have 1st refusal and mates rates if you're still interested in these.
Projects I was running: SCC 100% up till I got my 100 year badge then switched to a custom profile of OPN (64tasks) MCM (30tasks) ARP (10tasks) MIP (1task) so just enough to keep all threads busy. All QL1K boxes are Ubuntu 20.04LTS. SCC ran really well on these, the others less so and you'll have seen a step down in my performance on Dave's site. Still for the sheer number of threads per $ you can't beat these really.
BTW this morning I received an 8260M (QS), I've got another coming on Monday so assuming they both work ok I'll have 2 QL1K's without a home, let me know if you want them, they'll be the cheapest on the market.
BTW HPE were giving away iLO licences during the pandemic, hopefully the offer is still available. Alternatively if you prefer the physical connection to the server I've got a HP maintenance cable I've never used, it gives a VGA and some other ports but as iLO was free it became redundant, if you want it, it's yours.
Look forwards to updates on the build progress, it's great when everything comes together. You've already got some rack servers so I guess you're used to how noisy they are, they're definitely not for folks in flats

Morning Andy,

Thanks for all the info, you got a bargain there @£1200
Will certainly be interested in the QL1K's and the 2600/XL170r in the spring
I have an iLo enterprise license as run a fair bit of HP kit, noise isn't an issue as it'll be running in a server room which is substanially quieter after retiring 4 x HP EVA p6000's + 32 disk shelves, certainly wouldn't want to run it in bedroom
Cheers for the info on the projects, I should spend more time on this.
Will let you know how I get on and interested to see how those 8260M's perform, assuming you picked them up at the right price.