2018: Day 92 the one where a national championship game happened
Word count 180,605 + 1,000 or 181,605 of 1,000,000
Dear Reader,
Today was one of those days that I just want to put back on the shelf. Sure in the early hours of the morning I transfered my two GTX 1060 graphics cards from my Storm Stryker computer case to my Corsair Air 740 case. That move went swimmingly and was relatively easy to accomplish. The big switch took about 5 minutes to accomplish. Trying to manage all the thumb screws was the only really hard part of the whole endeavor. Sure to free up the 200 mm bottom fan on the Corsair Air 740 case I have it sitting on my aluminum briefcase that holds my Dell Studio 1535. You can probably tell from the thumbnail for the blog post today that the new setup is working out pretty well. The big aluminum briefcase also serves as a massive heatsink as well. The system is up and running and running the NiceHash cryptocurrency mining software.
My mining project is coming to a close here pretty soon. Wednesday April 11, 2018 will be 100 days from the start of the year. That will mark a major milestone in terms of my daily writing and my super exciting cryptocurrency mining adventure. Sure it was a lot more exciting when the price of a bitcoin was up around $20,000.00 and maybe climbing. Right now the price of a bitcoin is worth about $7,035.47 based on a cut and paste from the Coinbase dashboard. That is a far cry from the lofty heights of bitcoin past. Warren Buffett may have been the harbinger of cryptocurrency doom and gloom. I think the market and the process of mining is incredibly entertaining. For me that was the point of my 100 day mining extravaganza.
Both custom built computer rigs sit in my office under my glass executive Studio RTA desk. One of the doors on my Storm Stryker case is mismatched. It matches the pain of the Cooler Master Trooper case. It fits on the Storm Stryker case pretty well, but it does not match the overall paint scheme. Reaching behind the case and undoing two thumb screws was pretty easy. You might think the Storm Stryker case was not all that heavy. That assessment would be wrong. Just undoing a couple thumb screws and allowing the door to slide off is pretty easy. Inside the case the ASUS motherboard could support a maximum of three graphics cards. Each card connects to the motherboard and is capable of producing a ton of heat. They reside toward the bottom of the case by the power supply. All that heat has to go somewhere. My overall Storm Stryker build just does not clear the heat very well.
A few aftermarket fans are installed to help push all the heat from the graphics cards outside the computer case. Sure switching to the Corsair Air 740 will allow a lot more space on the motherboard side for air to move and a lot more space for connecting fans to the case. The Storm Stryker case is great, but it has a limited number of places to put fans. Each of the graphics cards was pretty easy to unplug from the motherboard. Just a basic clasp has to be released and two thumb screws per card. It all happened pretty quickly. Both cards were removed and they were transferred over to the new Corsair Air 740 case. The ASUS motherboard in that case can also support three graphics cards. I only have two GTX 1060 cards. That was all that was transferred from one case to the other. Based on the thermal monitoring for the cards it seems like the better airflow helped a little bit. No way really exists to get around the heat graphics cards produce when you have them mining cryptocurrency full steam ahead. Some folks have come up with very clever ways to expel the heat, but it still exists. It has to exist somewhere.
Topic 1: Watching the national championship game
Soon enough I’ll be able to watch the game. I’m not entirely sure which team I want to win. My interest in the NCAA tournament drops by a ton when the Jayhawks are done playing for the year. It is very interesting just how much emotion and energy I expend worrying about the fate of a University of Kansas basketball team. Let’s just say that it is a lot of energy. We could end up making it back to Lawrence, Kansas someday. Teaching their would be a pretty sweet job. Making that dream happen will probably require me to double down on my academic research efforts. Generating a ton of cutting edge artificial intelligence research may help my efforts. Sure right now I’m wondering about publishing more than 3 peer reviewed journal articles per year and how soon after the national championship game I’m going to cancel YouTube TV.
First, writing 3 academic papers a year is just about producing and engaging in research activities. So much data exists and so many potential artificial intelligence projects are possible right now that the effort is really could be expressed as a function of motivation vs. any type of structural limitation. Second, my writing efforts just need to stay focused and I need to spend the time on each paper to make it great. Third, canceling YouTube TV is really hard to do given the impending Karate Kid reboot. That really should not be enough to sway my decision one way or the other, but it really is… it just looks so epic. Yeah it just might be a 10 episode show called Cobra Kai being produced via the financing of YouTube Red. Here after the national championship game I’m going to cancel YouTube TV. That is about to happen in about 20 basketball minutes.
This feels like the longest halftime ever…
Dr. Nels Lindahl
Broomfield, Colorado
Written on my Storm Stryker PC and or my ASUS C101P using Google Docs
Leave a Reply