Designing a 6 GPU enclosure

[mooreaa_revo]

Hey everyone,

I've been working on a design for a 6 GPU rig and wanted to share what I'm doing. First off, I know that there are some pretty good rigs out there already. I studied a lot of the open frame designs out there and I found little short comings here and there on the existing enclosures so these the design has been evolving, tweaking/improving various aspects, I'll share some of the details of this on a future post. Mostly designing my own since

The rig design is pretty straight forward based on extruded aluminum for a solid build with adjustable rails. The motherboard tray and fan brackets are currently laser cut and I do have a few parts I'm testing with 3d printing.

Dimensions of the 6 GPU rig is: 520mm x 350mm x 360mm (W x H x D)

Design:
http://vi2.com/assets/rig_wip_1.png

Assembly:
http://vi2.com/assets/rig_wip_2_IMG_6241.JPG

First Prototype:
http://vi2.com/assets/rig_wip_3_IMG_6212.JPG

Learned a lot from the first real prototype. In particular, I can see some real issues with some of the existing rigs out there that have fixed rails especially for the GPU support. I had to adjust the back rail so that the GPUs would sit nicely on them w/o interfering with the risers.

The PSUs right now sit on the front rails and hang off in the back. Not really a problem yet, but I could add another rail there to support the PSUs. I'm also in the middle of looking into alternate PSU options for mining rigs so that may have a big impact on how I mount and handle PSUs.

The motherboard tray is really nice to have and I'm glad I decided to add that instead of mounting stand-offs directly to the rails. What I did notice was that there is a LOT of stress on the MBs when installing things like the ATX power connector so I think its good to secure the MB onto the tray with all the standoffs.

Right now I'm improving how the GFX cards sit on the rear rail so they don't move around so much. I've also got some MBs that can support more than 6 GPUs so I may start playing with larger rigs too.

Just wanted to share what I have so far and see if anyone has any feedback!

[Kalyst69]

nice job

[flip4flop]

Looks pretty good, nice job looks pretty clean and well put together!

[shibob]

Your design looks very cool!
For me, I just made it simple, the open frame costs about 25$ only:

[NameTaken]

An enclosures would be like a case which frames are not.

[shibob]

An enclosures would be like a case which frames are not.

You're right, for an enclosure, I bought it for a friend, the cost is about 90$.
This looks like a 4U rack case, but I think the ventilation is not really good, temperature always stays around 70C.

[gotminer]

Your design looks very cool!
For me, I just made it simple, the open frame costs about 25$ only:

Where can you get one of those for $25?  Or where do you get the materials to build it?

[mooreaa_revo]

Thanks for all the replies guys. I'll post some updates when I have some.

I'll share my thoughts on some of the rigs posted.

@shibob I did look at just using L channel initially as its costs are a lot lower. I think it works in some cases but found that isn't as easy to make adjustments so it works really well for on type of GPU, but the rear rail is fixed and wouldn't accommodate longer/shorter cards as easily. This particular issue is one of the main troubles with the main stream extruded case that you find on ebay/amazon. The rear rail will hit the GPU or the riser cards so the position needs to be adjustable in my opinion. Looks like you have quite a few of the same rigs so for your setup I have no doubt that the L channel material is less expensive.

One thing in particular that I am doing is adding plastic feet. You can buy this for the extrusion but I've designed my own part for this. If you frequently need to move a rig, or place it on a nice table, the metal frames will eat your table tops! The plastic feet really make a difference. No reason why you couldn't do this on the L channel either. This is just one of the little details I've added after playing with the case (and ending up with scratches on my work tables).

http://vi2.com/assets/rig_wip_4_foot.png

I did see the server style cases as well and have a friend looking at those as they have around the same cost as the cases I'm designing. You hit on the main issue which is cooling. The dense layout of the cables really limits airflow and you end up with a lot of trapped heat. If you try to exhaust this, you need to have higher CFM fans that push the air through and overall it seems like the enclosure is fighting purpose.

For my design I wanted to make sure I could move the heat away from the cards w/o it being a power hog. Before the chassis I was running big 20" fans to move air across the rigs, but from a power perspective that is quite expensive and on top of that it wasn't that effective. With the four 120mm fans I have now on the rig, the cards are running much cooler now and it also moves the heat away from the chassis. The GPUs act as channel to guide the air through from the rear to the front of the case. It also picks up any of the rising heat off the motherboard but thats fairly minimal.

[penetrak]

I looked at your design mining rig, nicely created. Here's the whole thread about these things, there's a myriad of mining rigs from different people https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=7216.0. I highly recommend.