Best Of The Render Farm (Compilation)

Summary

Distractible – "Best Of The Render Farm (Compilation)"

Podcast: Distractible | Hosts: Mark Fischbach, Wade Barnes, Bob Muyskens
Date: March 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this lively "best of" compilation, Mark, Wade, and Bob weave together the saga of Mark's quest to build his own homebrew render farm—a personal computing cluster dedicated to high-end rendering and simulation tasks. The episode charts Mark’s obsessive and often chaotic journey through server shopping, DIY cooling, catastrophic tech mishaps, and wild problem-solving. Between tech deep-dives and biting humor, the trio lay bare the financial, logistical, and emotional rollercoaster that comes with aspiring to out-engineer the world from your own garage (or, as it turns out, your bathroom). Listeners get Mark’s candid breakdown of successes and failures, plus classic Distractible banter and memorable running gags about tech, DIY disasters, and the pitfalls of “brilliant” new hobbies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Render Farm Dream: Origin & Motivation

• Mark introduces his "expensive new hobby": building a render farm to handle his movie renderings and simulations at home ([02:17]).
• Prefers DIY and discounted hardware, claims it’s a buyer’s market due to data centers upgrading to AI gear ([03:25]).
• Obsessed with getting the best deals, often via refurbished or eBay-sourced server equipment ([03:50]).

Quote:

“Now is the greatest time in the history of forever to build a render farm.”
—Mark ([05:05])

2. The Hunt for Discount Hardware & eBay Adventures

• Mark details his eBay methods: searching for server-grade processors and components companies are offloading at steep discounts ([05:08]).
• Achieves massive savings, but this comes with risks: quality control, missing documentation, and lack of support ([46:03], [47:05]).
• Cautions that sometimes, “Don’t buy cheap shit on eBay. Half of it doesn’t fucking work.” ([41:00], [43:05]).

Quote:

“Everything I’ve done is an attempt to save money. I have lost so much money.”
—Mark ([45:35])

3. The Logistics: Where to Put It All?

• Original render farm built in his garage, post-movie set teardown, including oversized air conditioning for heat management ([06:58]).
• At one point, the render farm takes over his bathroom, which becomes the running joke throughout the episode ([80:44]).

Quote:

“I want to be able to film movies from my house, even in a zombie apocalypse.”
—Bob ([08:19])

4. DIY Cooling: Water, Air, and… Glaubersalt?

• Tried various approaches: air conditioners, custom water cooling, and even immersion cooling using dielectric fluid ([16:10]–[19:53]).
• Mark explores DIY “cold batteries” with Glaubersalt (sodium sulfate decahydrate) to act as a phase-change cooling material, explaining its science and limitations ([34:28]–[40:49]).
• Frequently underestimates cooling needs—leading to multiplying AC units and skyrocketing power bills ([75:23]).

Quote:

“It felt like I was playing PowerWash Simulator… Today I’m going out to mop my solar panels.”
—Mark ([12:41])

5. Solar Power & Infrastructure Upgrades

• Invested in solar panels to offset power costs, buying them in bulk as another “great deal” ([55:06]–[57:39]).
• Delivery, installation, and physical scale all become their own set of challenges.

6. The Joys and Terrors of Water Cooling

• Details first attempts and failures at custom water-cooling, complete with catastrophic leaks:

“When I get through the second bottle, this pump just keeps chugging...then I finally notice—it’s swimming in the fluid.” ([41:46])

• Learns about pressure testing, air pockets, expensive fittings, and the fine print of server hardware compatibility ([65:21]–[66:54]).
• Comically describes how small miscalculations add up in both hardware and cost.

7. Weird Tech Mysteries & Render Farm Nightmares

• All five refurbished Dell computers suffer simultaneous boot drive corruption—Mark suspects malware or hardware flaw, but tech support offers no solutions ([24:04]–[31:14]).
• Ongoing issues with improper drivers, BIOS support, failing network connections, and hard-to-debug crashes ([68:07]–[73:18]).
• Tech support shenanigans and unhelpful customer service become a recurring theme ([26:46]–[28:47]).

Quote:

“Dell had no intention of finding out what went wrong at all...You motherfuckers.”
—Mark ([28:47])

8. Financial Realities of a Homebrew Render Farm

• Power consumption rapidly scales up: Mark’s electric bill hits $3,000 for a month ([75:23]), and he projects $36,000/year in electricity costs ([78:54]).
• Doing the math reveals it would (ironically) have been cheaper to just pay for commercial render services.

“I must be doing my math wrong. That can’t be right. And now here I am. My math was right.”
—Mark ([78:13])

9. Learning, Tinkering, and Acceptance

• Render farm ultimately relocated from the bathroom to a proper server room ([101:10]).
• Mark admits many solutions were overly complicated and plans to streamline in the future, embracing error-correcting memory and more efficient hardware ([96:09]–[96:35]).
• Candid about constant tinkering, enjoying the process even as things went awry.

Quote:

“I want to slide into my grave wishing I could do more.”
—Mark ([103:10])

10. Comic Relief & Notable Running Gags

• Mark’s ongoing “render farm in my bathroom” becomes an episode-long joke ([80:44]–[101:10]).
• The group riffs on firewalls, chipmunk-wizard curses, and absurd DIY solutions (e.g., physically lighting a firewall, dunking servers in thick water to ward off tech gremlins) ([32:12]–[34:16]).
• Wade and Bob offer faux-tech support, bad puns (“el servo”), and tangent-laden advice.
• Friendly roasting about HomeLab subreddit nerds critiquing Mark’s janky setups ([98:55]–[99:38]).

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Watering Solar Panels:

  “There I am, standing on my roof, watering my solar panels because they’re dirty and encrusted with grime...as this, like, wonderful era we live in with all this technology…and there I stand with a garden hose.”
  —Mark ([11:38])

• DIY Dielectric Fluid:

  “You take your whole computer and you stick it in a liquid…so good for it, actually.”
  —Mark ([17:09])

• On Power Bill Reality:

  “My power bill was $3,000. My yearly power bill is going to be $36,000.”
  —Mark ([75:23]; [78:54])

• Philosophy of Tinkering:

  “It’s just tinkering with Legos but with expensive computer equipment.”
  —Mark ([98:46])

• On Reddit Critics:

  “They came in and I said, yeah, I want to put a server in my bathroom. And then they go fuck you. And they leave. They don’t do it.”
  —Mark ([96:35])

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Timeline & Notable Segments

| Timestamp | Topic/Segment | |---------------|---------------------------------------------| | [02:17] | Mark introduces new render farm hobby | | [05:08] | eBay strategy for server components | | [12:41] | Comic relief: Watering solar panels | | [16:10] | Water cooling and immersion cooling explainer | | [24:04] | All five Dell computers die at once | | [41:46] | Catastrophic leak in water cooling setup | | [55:06] | Solar panel bulk purchase logistics | | [65:21] | Fluid dynamics nightmares in custom loops | | [75:23] | Power bill bombshell | | [80:44] | “Rat’s nest” render farm in bathroom | | [86:32] | IT networking disasters and frustration | | [96:09] | Plans for streamlined, efficient render farm | | [99:38] | HomeLab subreddit controversy | | [101:10] | Render farm moves out of bathroom | | [103:10] | Mark’s philosophy—never stop tinkering |

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Tone & Style Notes

The episode is hilariously self-deprecating, often technical but always accessible, peppered with sarcasm, puns, and classic “Distractible” digressions. While Mark provides passionate, detail-heavy breakdowns, Wade and Bob keep the mood light, riffing off Mark’s rants, mocking his trials, and making the esoteric deeply relatable.

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Conclusion

“Best Of The Render Farm” is both a love letter to and a cautionary tale about ambitious home tech projects. Mark’s journey is a saga of passion, stubbornness, technical struggle, and the quiet joy (and ruinous expense) of DIY. Whether you’re a hardware nerd or just enjoy three friends roasting each other over expensive failures, this episode is a masterclass in Distractible’s irreverent, endlessly entertaining storytelling.

Transcript

[Mark]

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[Wade]

The folks over at T Mobile have some big news for you. They now have the fastest 5G home Internet according to the experts at Ookla Speedtest.

[Bob]

So if you want the fastest 5G speeds with a 5 year price guarantee, visit t mobile.com homeinternet to check availability.

[Mark]

Price guarantee exclusions like taxes and fees apply. Fastest based on Ookla Speed test intelligence data second half 2025 all rights reserved. From ebay escapades to solar powered situations.

[Wade]

Yes,

[Mark]

it's time for Best of no Render Farm. So I have a new hobby. A new expensive hobby.

[Wade]

Yeah, we know about the lenses.

[Mark]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't understand.

[Bob]

All right, who's our next guest gonna be? Who like, breaks a house trying to get you your thing?

[Mark]

No, it's not like that at all, is it?

[Bob]

Mobile games, they can be expensive.

[Mark]

They can be. But to build a render farm, that's

[Wade]

not as exciting as you're trying to make it seem.

[Mark]

Well, come on.

[Wade]

I am. Personally, I do think that's interesting because I'm interested exactly at what the infrastructure for that is and how you set that. But like, to normal people, that's an even tougher sell than lenses. I'm going to be honest. I'm going to be honest.

[Mark]

Oh, come on.

[Bob]

I'm going to let you cook here only because I filled up my synology the other day. I've had it for, I don't know, 10 years. I've had it for a very long time. And it's got 30 terabytes of storage. Last night I went to transfer some files, full up.

[Mark]

Damn.

[Bob]

So if you've got space for me, Mark, I'm in.

[Mark]

Yeah, so I, I think, Wade, you'll like this because you know when I was doing that whole hard drive stint which people forgot about when the lenses took over, but I was doing a hard drive thing there for a bit.

[Bob]

Yeah, when you were thunderstruck, whatever it was called.

[Mark]

Yes, exactly. Thunderbolt. So I built a server that has 400 terabytes of storage, right? Because I was like, I'm going to future proof this. I had went a whole hard drive kick. I got some refurbished hard drives. If there's one thing I love is that doing these hobbies and trying to find a good deal for them even, because it' expensive a lot of these things. So I always try to find like the good deal for it. So I bought refurbished hard drives. And in every way that's a big. No, no, no, don't do that. But it just so happened in a specific situation that I did this. There was some cryptocurrency that was based on hard drive space I talked about before, yada yada yada. But Render Farm is different because it's extremely difficult to get server infrastructure at a cheap price. Unless you just so happen to be in an era where everyone with a data center is replacing their hardw hardware with this new fancy AI bullshit hardware and they're throwing everything out at incredible discounts. And you can find the most amazing server hardware ever on ebay for steep discounts.

[Bob]

Okay, how much is a steep discounted? 400 terabyte.

[Wade]

Oh, you're not going to like this.

[Mark]

I'm talking like 50% plus discounts, right? How much is a 4090 right now? Right?

[Bob]

4900 couple grand, isn't it?

[Wade]

2200 bucks or something.

[Mark]

90s right now is like 2 grand. Like around that. It's still very expensive. You can get some things with a 4090 in it. An entire CPU, RAM like power supply, motherboard case, all this for $2400. So 400 more than the card and a 4090 in there. 400 more than the card itself for the entire computer. With an NVM 2 terabyte NVMe, it's got 64. Look at. Even my camera agrees.

[Wade]

What the is. Why is that happen? Is there a thumbs up on your.

[Mark]

It's so positive. You can get all that for $2,400. And that's, that's, that's Still a lot of money. But you talk about getting the computer with a 4090 in it for that. Now here's the real kicker. That's just keep talking. That's just domestic level computer hardware, right? At steep discounts. Because now is a better time than ever in the history of forever to get a computer. Because there are so many companies that are trying to clear shit out to get this new shit in.

[Wade]

What do I search for on ebay for this? Give me some keywords.

[Mark]

What you want to up on ebay is you want to find, you want to find the specific server grade processor that you want. Because what's happening is all these companies realize they need GPUs right now. So actually GPU deals are hard to come by for work workstation level graphics. But you can still get good deals because people are still trading out computers. But you can get like 6,496, 128 core processors in their server chassis with all with like a terabyte of ram. I don't even know what you would do with a terabyte of RAM for like 80% off of the cost. And they are perfectly functional, very modern, like only a year or two old. But because every company in existence is trying to get rid of what they have and replace it with these bigger GPU based servers with like 8 GPUs in them. You can get, you get the craziest, you can get the craziest for so much less. There's processors out there that are like $12,000. You can get, you can get two of them, you can get two of them for like 25% of the. Which is a lot. I haven't bought these, but this is why I'm like now is the greatest time in the history of forever to build a render farm.

[Bob]

I want to see your half a million dollar server set up.

[Mark]

You don't need to spend half a million dollars. What was I just telling you?

[Bob]

I don't know. I had left.

[Mark]

Oh yeah, you weren't here. Where did you go?

[Bob]

I had important business to take care of.

[Wade]

I'm with you, Mark. I see where you're laying down.

[Mark]

Yeah, you see what I'm laying down? You see what?

[Wade]

So what you're going to buy, well, you're going to lease space and just buy a bunch of secondhand servers and set up a render for cheap for people to use.

[Mark]

No, just do it in my garage. If I have to lease space, that's going to cost more money. But if I do in my garage, where's the Car go.

[Wade]

I don't.

[Mark]

My car hasn't been in my garage for a year, man.

[Wade]

Yeah, I mean, he, you know, he had movies set in there and stuff. Or whatever.

[Mark]

Yeah, I have a whole set in there. But once that's gone, now the movie's done, I have space for everything. And I put. I put air conditioning in there because filming in there in the summer was such a pain because it wasn't air conditioned. So I put an oversized air conditioner in my garage so I can have a server rack in my garage.

[Bob]

I can't believe you filmed a whole movie in your garage. I didn't realize that.

[Mark]

I picked up a lot of shots in my garage. I was basically talking about it for the past year, wasn't it?

[Wade]

He did talk a lot about that.

[Bob]

Yeah. I feel like, oh, that's crazy. You know what? Mark points to someone.

[Mark]

So I want to build a render farm. I want to get some sweet deals on some sweet computers and put them into my garage. And I'm sure that buying this shit off of ebay is definitely reliable.

[Wade]

Well, so you're saying ebay, these companies aren't going out of business, but they still probably like offload these to just like wholesalers or something, right? Can you go to like in person in auctions where this stuff would be even cheaper? Probably, for sure.

[Mark]

I haven't scratched the surface of where these sales are. I've only really just started looking and finding like incredible deals. If anybody knows the secret ends of where to get this for the cheapest prices, put it on the subreddit, let me know about it. I'm about to start a rendering revolution because online render services cost way too much. And if I can do it from home because I got solar panels so I don't even need to clean from the electricity.

[Bob]

Okay, man, if we have a zombie apocalypse, you're going to be able to film movies from your house.

[Wade]

Mark's never going to have to stop making content.

[Mark]

Yeah, one can only hope. One can only hope. Anyway, that's my small talk. My latest hobby. Have I told you guys about it? Render farm. Oh, yeah.

[Wade]

Render farm.

[Mark]

Render, my main man. Tug them 4470. You're the real. You're the real, real. You get me the best discounts on possibly good server hardware. I'm sure I haven't even gotten it yet. I'm sure it's great.

[Wade]

Where are they coming from?

[Mark]

Shenzhen, China.

[Wade]

Well, isn't that where all electronics come from?

[Mark]

I feel like that's going into possibly prejudiced territory. But keep going.

[Wade]

I honestly, there's just like the manufacturing in Shenzhen is like every piece of technology.

[Mark]

Where was the place where the glycine factory was medical grade glycine? Medical grade glycine? Did you hear about this? Of course not. It's me on TikTok. There was a huge trend where there was this nonstop talk about medical grade glycine. And there was this one. What is glycine? I don't know.

[Wade]

I don't know. And I don't know what it's for.

[Bob]

Okay.

[Wade]

I just know that medical grade glycine was very important.

[Mark]

So there's. There's certain things that you can do. And CG is like computer graphics. A lot of it comes down to rendering. But there's. There's a whole world of like, art there that I know I'll never fully get. I won't be an expert at it, but at least the technology side is like, okay, for the sake of rendering, I can render and I can figure out how to do that. I can build a render farm. Right? I know how to build a computer because I've done it before. I've done it for you. I look into it like a server can't be that different. And so this is where my brain goes. It goes from one to the other. I have a basis of knowledge. This is a problem that I'm facing. I think I can figure out, puzzle away to a solution using my knowledge. You never have any, like, desire to do that?

[Bob]

My knowledge is to socially outreach and find someone else who can solve my problem.

[Mark]

I was going to go into the spiel of all the hardware that I've come back to and talking about that and talking about the latest thing that's going to make people so mad about me talking about it. I can't wait for people to be pissed off.

[Wade]

Is it a render farm?

[Mark]

I forgot a drink. You can't say that word in front of him.

[Wade]

Render farm. Did render farms kill his family?

[Mark]

Yeah, probably. I'm gonna go with yes.

[Bob]

You ever swallow and immediately know you did it wrong and you're fucked.

[Wade]

Did you just do that unrelated to me saying the word render farm or

[Mark]

was that completely unrelated?

[Bob]

I was just taking a sip and my body was like, I should breathe

[Mark]

that I've been building my render farm. I'm a render farm expert. I'm an expert.

[Bob]

You're still on about that?

[Mark]

I've discovered the magic that is blown fuses. Uh, so turns out computers draw a lot of power. They A lot of power. And so for those that aren't aware that even just running one computer all day long is an incredible draw of power. It's like running a microwave constantly. So one of the things that I'm. I'm looking into is getting power into my house, like, figuring out the power system. I'm trying to get, like, a better battery backup, But I. I was doing something yesterday that I. I was okay. So I was up on my roo, and I realized how cosmically stupid what I was doing was. I climbed up on the roof, and I called for, can you pass me the hose? So she throws me the hose, and there I am, standing on my roof, watering my solar panels because they're dirty and encrusted with grime. But I just, like. I just was, like, standing there and thinking about it as this, like, wonderful era that we live in with all this technology and able to just grab electricity out of the air with solar panels. And there I stand with a garden hose being like, this will fix it.

[Bob]

Well, if you want to grow your solar farm, you've got to water it.

[Wade]

Yeah, that's true. That's true.

[Mark]

It just. It just felt so dumb. It was happening.

[Bob]

But then I. I thought you were gonna tell me you were cleaning out your gutters or something. I was not expecting the twist of watering your solar panel.

[Mark]

No, no. Because I could understand, like, cleaning out the gutters. And what I should have done is I. I have a Ryobi power washer. And what's great about it is it has a hose attachment on it, but my hose isn't long enough, and I didn't have the batteries charge, and I was just like, let me go up, see what they are. And they looked pretty crusty.

[Bob]

Were you using the solar panel attachment for.

[Mark]

Shut up.

[Wade]

You know, they actually make a Ryobi solar panel cleaner. It's basically the same as a power washer, but it's designed to work way better on solar panels.

[Mark]

Yeah, because that stuff is crusty. Because I got done, I wash it off, and I. You know, I felt like I was playing power wash simulator because I didn't have enough pressure because I had one of those little handles. But, you know, at the distance, the wind alone was beating me. So I got done. Everything was wet, and I. I thought I washed it thoroughly. I saw some gunk run off, and by the time I got to the end, I went back to the beginning, and the beginning was dry. It was just as dusty. It was super, like, just as crusted over. Couldn't see a single cell. And, like, damn, It. So I bought, Amy bought a big mop with a big handle. So today I'm going to go out and mop my solar panels.

[Bob]

If people out there want to know what the celebrity lifestyle is like, it is mopping your solar panels on your roof.

[Mark]

So yeah, that's what I get to look forward to. And so I'm realizing that with all of this computer power that man, I um, yeah, things are going good. Things are going real good. I have all the parts assembled there. But I realized that I got the wrong case for it because I'm not building a server rack. I'm basically just building a few computers for, for my Houdini render farm. But I got the wrong case size because, you know, it's been a while since I built a computer. I used to always do it. And then I kind of fell into people doing the custom water cooling solutions because I was like, I don't really want to fiddle with all that. So I'd rather get it from a company that's going to do it. But for these, for these things like the prices are so stupid. For like business level st. That's why businesses don't make any sense. I don't know how businesses ever make money when they pay like business prices for things. Because you got like home Internet, you pay home Internet, it could be like up to $100 for good Internet. And that's, that's pricey. A business Internet line starts in the thousands. And I'm like, wait a minute, where does this jump occur? Why, why is this. But that's just what businesses pay for. They just do that. And other people charge businesses like these exorbitant rates and it's like, like it doesn't make any sense because the price of these, these big workstation computers from a, from a pre built manufacturer, like there's a markup for pre built computers. For consumer level hardware, what should be like a $10,000 computer. If you bought all the parts in a very good computer, someone will mark up up to $50,000 for, for the entire thing to be assembled. If you look at some of the higher end workstations, it doesn't make any sense. So I'm building it myself again because I've done that before and it's not much different. But I got the wrong case because it's an ss, it says SSI E, not an EATX motherboard. And even though the case says ETX and the motherboard I bought was listed

[Bob]

as EatX, have you tried the eat ass motherboards?

[Mark]

But what if we had. In our movie theater, we had a LAN area. We had little pods where people could do like if they wanted to record YouTube videos or stream or something. We had little rooms segmented off where there was like one computer with a camera already set up and a light already set up. And also all those computers are part of my render farm.

[Wade]

Yes.

[Bob]

And we can farm bitcoin while we play.

[Mark]

No, no, no, that's not. You can't do it on normal hardware. That's not an efficient way to get bitcoin.

[Bob]

Not with that attitude.

[Mark]

Oh, that's why you're the handsome one.

[Bob]

Ah, see, you want to give me bitcoin.

[Mark]

You just don't know it. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know what to believe anymore with you, but. Right. Isn't that a great idea?

[Wade]

It's the best idea.

[Mark]

No. Well, I mean, I do of little things that I've been working on, but you know, I don't want to bog anyone down with my really cool ideas and things.

[Bob]

Is it lenses and. Or render farm?

[Wade]

No,

[Mark]

No, no. Maybe you'd actually appreciate it. Maybe actually appreciate because it's only adjacent to it. I want. I'm trying to get back into water cooling. So when you're building a computer and this, this applies to people out there, you have. You can have the option of water cooling components and it's kind of like a. It's a higher level way of building a computer, but it can yield like a lot better results than just air cooling. Because if you have a bu. Fans in your computer. The computer that I built for you was air cooled, you know, it wasn't water cooled. There was just like a big old air cooler on it, I think. Unless I did put it in a.

[Wade]

Probably had an aio, didn't it?

[Mark]

That one with the threadripper was the last one that I built there.

[Wade]

Oh, maybe not. No, maybe not.

[Mark]

Yeah, I have no idea. But either way, I've been getting into water cooling again because there's a lot of really funky new developments in the world of water cooling. And I've really wanted to try immersion cooling cooling. Have you got. You guys heard of this?

[Wade]

I have actually.

[Bob]

No.

[Mark]

So immersion cooling is literally what it sounds like. You take your whole computer and you stick it in a liquid, you go.

[Bob]

And that's okay for it.

[Mark]

That's okay for. It's so good for it, actually.

[Wade]

It has to be the right kind of liquid.

[Mark]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It can't just be spit or piss or something like that. Yeah. So you, you get a special fluid that's called dielectric fluid. It's non conductive so that when it's in there, it's not going to like zap. Because the thing is, water, pure water, is actually not very conductive. It's the impurities in water that cause it to become conductive and that can cause it to short out and then it'll go kabloom. So you need a pure. Whatever this fluid is, you can't have like dust getting in it or anything like that. It takes some cleaning required and there's some extra things. But the way you can do is you can take your whole computer really dense, like get the density way up and stick it in a, in a vat of fluid and it'll circulate the fluid and it'll cool all the components in it. Right.

[Bob]

Do you run the computer while it's in there?

[Mark]

Yeah.

[Bob]

Okay, go on, expound.

[Mark]

So it's dielectric, right. So the fluid is entirely non conductive. So all of your, your plugs and stuff in the computer, you power plug, it's in there. You know, it's, it's powered, it's got all the peripherals in there. This is usually for data centers and stuff like that. But there are people that, you know, their home computer, they basically get a fish tank, right? And they just put their whole, they build their whole motherboard and stuff inside the fish tank and then they fill it up with this fluid and you'll see it. It's pretty cool.

[Bob]

Cool.

[Mark]

I can actually pull up, like, because

[Bob]

I'm picturing like your tower. You just shove it in a kiddie pool. And then all the wires and stuff, it's like, does it just like bend up to come out of the tank or they're like, how do you turn it on? If it's in the tank, how do you keep it from getting impure?

[Mark]

It's real tricky, but this is it.

[Bob]

Okay, so like the tank is also the tower. It's not like the tower and a tank. The tank is also the tower.

[Mark]

So this one's trickier. I think this one is at a higher risk of problems because the top is open, right? So you see the cables going into the top. The back of the motherboard is at the top of this fish tank that's in front of everyone. And so the plugs go in the top. Now the problem with this is dust and impurities can get into the fluid this way. It's not sealed off. Ideally, you want something that's more sealed and the other issue here is there's probably not as much circulation. I think this is, it's, it's just more of a kind of a funny build that's actually looks like a fish tank. But in industrial applications, you put your entire server rack inside this fluid. You can get the density up. You just needed to circulate things and it's weird, it's super weird to look at. Your mind goes like, that's not right. But it works, it works and it works well. It cools things really efficiently.

[Bob]

How pure are the rocks and the fruity Pebbles?

[Mark]

Oh, essential. Essential for that. Yeah. You want your 90s ass color scheme glow in the dark rocks at the bottom so that you can really get all the gaming juice out of your components. Yeah. So I'm looking into this and I'm probably going to break some things for

[Wade]

a computer or for a server size stu.

[Mark]

Server size stuff. But the problem is, you know, everything server sized takes a premium. So I'm trying to like see if I, if I just get a big enough, you know, horse drinking trough if I do that.

[Bob]

How annoying is this to change out? Like let's say a part fails, you have to replace a part, pull it

[Mark]

out, you shake it off a bit. I mean it's about as annoying as like you can imagine it is. It's, it's literally dunked in a fluid that's probably slightly toxic.

[Bob]

But like can you put your impure fingers in this liquid without to replace the whole liquid?

[Wade]

No. You should wear like gloves and stuff.

[Mark]

Ideally, you know, you're doing this in a very professional way. But you know, I'm not the most professional person.

[Wade]

I mean they make like filtration systems. There must be a type of filtration that you could use to filter your dielectric juice. Is it expensive? Is dielectric liquid water, whatever. Because it's a special thing, Right. You don't really buy it in 50 gallon barrels. You buy it in, you know, smaller containers than that.

[Mark]

You know, like paint, where they have that special paint that's so dark it's like only point one percent reflectivity.

[Wade]

Sure.

[Mark]

That is very expensive. But you can get black paint that is like 2% reflectivity still extremely dark for way cheaper than that. Right. It's the same with these fluids. Some people have proprietary fluids that are crazy expensive that they have patents on and they sell because it's that much better at non conductiveness or non cooling or cooling capacity or stuff like that. And so these companies want to sell them at premiums but you can get. There is dielectric fluid that you can get that will not be as expect as expensive.

[Bob]

That's a cool.

[Mark]

So if everything blows up, a lot of my things seem to like have a risk, high risk of electrocution and explosions. But that's how you know you're really, really starting to get somewhere.

[Bob]

You're also starting to push your, your drowned man saga on yourself because like your power washing on your roof and now you're getting liquid on your computer. You're starting to really toy with liquid. And as someone who deals with liquid. Liquid, it's a dangerous game.

[Mark]

I had a crazy idea to what if I pumped air through my pool? You know, because I thought Linus, you know, when he did his pool cooling for his whole server where he ran tubes, his problem was that he did liquid cooling underneath the pool. I'm like, what if you just pump air through the pool and then blow that air in and you got a cheap air conditioner, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. Is there, okay, perpetual energy? Not perpetual energy. What if. Is there a way that you. You know how your water has. Is pressurized, right? So you got water. What if. What if I have my water pipe? I build an illegal extension to go up really high, pour onto a giant water wheel that's going to generate electricity, but at the bottom of it, I just have it pump back into the pipe where it came out of. That way the water company never knows. They never know.

[Wade]

Yeah, no, they have. They don't have anything for that. They have no idea.

[Mark]

That's how it works. Right? I just have the open pipe at the bottom. It just. It funnels right back in.

[Bob]

It would work.

[Mark]

I just put the negative pressure terminal. Yeah, I just put it in reverse. Yeah.

[Bob]

Like, I have some questions about it, but I'm just going to not ask them and assume you're correct.

[Wade]

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[Mark]

No, seriously. Their 5G home Internet speeds are officially the fastest, which means that when you're downloading all your movies that aren't mine, every single one except for mine, you'll get them at the fastest speeds possible, along with all your video calls and uploading files and maybe Even streaming something in the background, you know.

[Bob]

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[Mark]

So I got a mystery. This isn't the episode, this is the, this is just a random aside that I want to talk about. So I, I, as you know, I've bought some refurbished computers right from Dell and I had them running. I was running, you know, a little render farm and I've been doing small scale experiments with these computers as I try to build out what I'm going to do. So I had five computers running and for weeks now they've been running fine, they've been working perfectly. I've actually, you know, done some experimentation with underclocking, you know, or undervolting the graphics cards, yada yada, it doesn't matter. Two nights ago, or yesterday morning rather, I woke up, all five computers that I had running were offline, all five of them. And I'm like, well that's strange, not one of them. I load up each one of them, I load up the first one and I discover, oh, the boot drive is corrupted, it cannot boot, can't boot windows, it does its self diagnostics, all the hardware is fine. It can't boot windows, can't boot at all, it can't even find the boot drive. So I load up the next one. 2 of 5, same thing, boot drive corrupted. And here's the thing, I don't know if me even talking about this is painting a big target on my back. Oh, it definitely is, but I'm going to keep talking about it because it's just fascinating. All offline at this point. Third one, same deal, same exact problem. Boot drive corrupted. Fourth one. One boot drive corrupted. Fifth one. Boot drive is corrupted.

[Bob]

What time was this, that, that you found this?

[Mark]

I don't know what time they all went offline because I couldn't find any logs or anything like that. I didn't have anything robust to set them up. These were just render notes, they didn't have anything on them. They were just running two pieces of software basically is all they were running. So they were technically connected to the Internet. I didn't even have monitors Connected to them. So I had, you know, I, I, I was remoting into them just to even get there. But I had to like, I have a bit, little, little like clamshell KVM so I can plug into them and see what's going on. And I'm like, that's super weird. What are the odds that five computers in different parts of my house all running the same software, but also other computers in my house were running this software as well? All of the. Only the Dell ones shut down and got corrupted.

[Bob]

Can I posit a theory here?

[Mark]

Yeah, what's up?

[Bob]

Okay, do you remember the story we just told? The bird chipmunk wizard theory? Okay, what did we talk about yesterday on this podcast we're recording? Talked about about Adele and Boots.

[Mark]

Go on.

[Bob]

And now your Adele's won't Boots.

[Wade]

Oh, okay.

[Bob]

I'm just saying, put the tinfoil hats on because what day did that issue occur? Oh yeah, during the Adele boots day. Bob gave one hint all day. You know what that hint was? Boots.

[Wade]

Whoa, whoa, whoa. That imply that this is my fault somehow.

[Bob]

Remember that song?

[Mark]

Never mind.

[Bob]

I will find a render farm like you, Adele.

[Mark]

All right, so this is very strange, right? So I contact Dell customer service and I've got a, I've got a customer service gripe to pick because. All right, clearly this isn't normal, right?

[Wade]

No, that's pretty weird.

[Mark]

It's very strange. My only guess is that it was some type of malware that somehow got into the computers. And again, this like maybe painting a big target on my back. I have no idea. But something got into the computers and corrupted the boot drive. It's very easy to cause these things to become unstable. If you like, delete system 32 or something like that, you can basically render a whole computer by doing that and it would just cause a bunch of problems. It wouldn't, it would not be able to boot anymore. It wouldn't be able to repair itself. I'm not saying doing that would do that, but, you know, a lot of things can be done that just doesn't

[Wade]

have a lot of value to the malicious party other than fucking your shit up, I guess.

[Mark]

Yeah, I have no idea either. So I reach out to like Dell customer service and I knew something was wrong when I was being answered by the Dell social media team, which was a little strange. But I'm hoping that that's Dell's customer service on the social media team. And I go through this all day. I'm like, this is weird, right? Can you help me find figure out why this is happening. I was like, okay, let's troubleshoot it. So they run me around for hours and hours doing all these troubleshooting tasks that I keep saying, like, yeah, I've done the basics. I've done your diagnostics. There's nothing wrong with the hardware. And then it goes on and on. They keep leading my, like, you're going to find out why this happened, right? Like, no, let's just do the next step. You're going to find out why this happens, right? Let's just do the next step. You're going to find out why that happens, right? All right. Create a thumb drive with a Windows install on it. And I'm thinking in my head, I'm doing anything to not do this, because if I format that drive, any evidence that of what happened on that computer is going to be erased or become much harder to find if I do a fresh install of Windows on it. And I keep asking them like, just. And they're like, please, just do the next step. We are going through this. This is the process we need to get. I'm like, okay. And so I reinstall it, do that. And then I tell them, like, okay, I'm in Windows now what? And they're like, great, let us know if there's any problem. Keep an eye on it. Have a good day. And I'm like, you motherfucker. Motherfuckers. You sons of bitches. You had no intention of finding out what went wrong with it at all. I was like, just take this computer back and look at.

[Wade]

Have.

[Mark]

Have computer. There's such a thing as computer forensics. You can look into the hard drive and find out some logs. You can dig in there and you can. But they had no desire to do any of that. They were never going to do it. And they strung me along the entire time.

[Wade]

Did you do all five, or did you say, do you have any that are still.

[Mark]

No, I only did one.

[Wade]

Okay?

[Mark]

I only did one because I. I have all five with the same problem. But they would not admit. They would not admit that five going offline for the same reason, all independently of each other, wasn't weird, right? And they kept thinking, like, it's just like a random software corruption. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. The odds of random software corruption occurring across five machines at the same time is statistically most likely improbable or not impossible. Nothing's impossible, but whatever. It seems much more likely that this is some kind of security vulnerability that was exploited or something like that. And it's only these. It's. My other computers are fine. Only these. What's up with that?

[Bob]

It was kind of brilliant. Now they've got you as a complicit party and covering up the evidence. If you do get a forensics specialist, they're gonna see that you covered up one of the five.

[Mark]

What. What crime is being.

[Bob]

I don't know, man, but it's pretty bad. If Adele's getting you involved in the

[Mark]

COVID up, you're right.

[Bob]

And they got the social media team involved. So that way the moment you try to say anything, they're like, they've already got the posts read. Supplier covers up corruption at Dell.

[Mark]

You're right.

[Bob]

Inside job.

[Mark]

That's it. That's it. That's the one. That's it. And look, it's like, I know, what can they do? All I wanted was them to just escalate it to the next level of being like, yeah, this is weird enough. Maybe you should look into this. It's probably nothing. It's probably something like as I was running them, like it was some port was not forwarded correctly in the computers. It allowed someone to get in or a virus to get in. I'm not saying this was like a specific attack. It just seems like this is malware riding across the software for the render farm thing that I was using that allowed like some piece of malware to get in, deleted a system thing and boop, all the thing go. Yeah, it's more likely that that happened, but it's also worth exploring. I can't use these computers if that's possible. That was my point to them is like I can't rely on these to do what I need them to do. If there is something like that in them. I don't think it's the software I'm using because I'm using it across my other computers. But maybe again it might be.

[Wade]

I mean it might be. I like a driver compatibility where it's the software and some specific thing in the Dell machines and they all have it because they're all the same machine or something.

[Mark]

But. Yeah, exactly.

[Wade]

No, it's weird to corrupt the boot disk like that is like not. What would normally happen is they would just blue screen and then you could, you could get it to post and maybe it would continue to have an issue. You have to do drivers or reinstall or whatever. But like, yeah, I'm not an expert, but as far as I know that's a much weirder outcome.

[Mark]

Yes. Yeah.

[Wade]

That's not something where it's like whoopsie doodles. And then your whole boot drive is just corrupted. That's a different kind of issue.

[Mark]

It's very strange.

[Bob]

You guys are basing too much stuff on facts here. I think Bob's earlier theory about the wizard chipmunk, he's trying to get his revenge because you caught him like practicing his bird, which wasn't perfect. So he's like half chipmunk. And then he fully went chipmunk and he's like, fine, I just won't even be a bird. Fuck this guy.

[Mark]

It is strange.

[Bob]

And then he followed you home as a chipmunk and attacked your computers to get back at you.

[Mark]

I did think, I was almost positive that when I first saw that bird, it was a chipmunk first. That's what I saw in my mind. I might have seen a shape shifting chipmunk.

[Bob]

I think Bob was originally right.

[Wade]

Just a glitch in the matrix. Here, let me give you, let me give you a Wade solution here.

[Mark]

Hang on. Okay, I'm ready.

[Wade]

All right, Mark, I know how to solve this problem. It's not the Dell computers themselves need is a Costco sized jug of lighter fluid and then a lighter to light the lighter fluid. And then what you do is you take all of your computers and you set them in a smaller area, small enough where you could draw a circle on the ground around them in lighter fluid. And you want to use like the whole bottle, like as much as you can. You might need multiple bottles, I don't even know. But you basically want all of the wires, all of the networking stuff, all of the computers all inside this circle. And before you turn them on to do anything, you light the lighter fluid. So you've got a wall of fire around all of your computers.

[Bob]

Those are important to protect you.

[Wade]

I know this about technology. The firewall will keep you safe, Mark.

[Mark]

I've heard of this mythical firewall.

[Bob]

I've got an alternate.

[Mark]

Okay.

[Bob]

Wizards are sometimes like the male equivalent of witches. And we know from even dating back to like the 1940s or even earlier, witches don't like water. So if you pour water on each machine, you'll melt the witches out of them.

[Mark]

Oh, oh, okay. I have a pool. Can I just throw them in the pool?

[Bob]

Yeah, in theory, yeah.

[Mark]

Okay. All right, cool.

[Wade]

No, you know what, Mark, you were telling us about how you wanted to do water computers in water, right? You were talking about that. We talked about that. What you do is because you said the water needed to be a special kind, it needed to be thick or something. Get a bunch of the leftover thicket that you have from redacted. Get a. Get a bathtub filled with thick water and then just submerge all the computers in there. That'll melt the witch out and keep it it out. Plus, then they'll be real cool. Because of what you were saying about water cooling.

[Mark]

Yeah. You. You listened.

[Bob]

Or get a snake big enough to eat a chipmunk or a small bird, because clearly it's the only thing the wizard can turn into. Release a snake into each computer, so that way, if the wizard comes back, it's ready to be gobbled up.

[Wade]

That's good defense.

[Mark]

That's great.

[Wade]

If you could find a species of snake that can survive underwater, you could combine some of these solutions.

[Bob]

That's true, too. If you can find a fire that can burn underwater.

[Wade]

Are you jotting these down for.

[Mark]

Yeah, yeah. I'm really, really keeping track of everything that we're doing today.

[Wade]

I appreciate that.

[Mark]

Well, that's. I really appreciate you guys helping me out, and I appreciate being able to rape about something else.

[Wade]

Someone out there is like, oh, my God, Mark is under attack. I need to get him a message. Totally happening.

[Mark]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Anyway, Glaubersal. G L A U B E R apostrophe S. Glaubersalt. Remember the name. It's going to change the world.

[Bob]

How so?

[Mark]

Well, that's what for us to discuss. Just chucking it out there. Glober salt.

[Wade]

I feel like generating heat is not as much of an issue in the world as dissipating heat and avoiding excess heat generation is.

[Bob]

You're.

[Mark]

Yes, yes. Go on, go on.

[Wade]

Well, this doesn't seem to. Is Glaubersalt used in, like, heat exchangers or something? Like, what are we talking about? Like, is this.

[Mark]

Gosh, almost. Almost. So here's the thing. You boil water, you put your Glaubersalt in it, and that mixture alone creates a concoction that would freeze at degrees Fahrenheit.

[Wade]

That's scientifically true, but that doesn't mean it's cold.

[Mark]

Now, now, here's the thing. If you add regular table salt to your mixture, you will lower the freezing point of that mixture same way as if you put salt on ice, it'll start to melt because the freezing point is now lower than what it should be. You can. If you put a certain ratio into it. I don't remember it off the top of my head, you can create a mixture that will freeze at 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit, exactly. What most people might consider room temperature. And if you put xanthan gum, it'll turn into a gel so that it's easier to, you know, handle than just like pure liquid. And then you have a gel, like a gel pack that'll freeze at 70 degrees. And what that takes advantage of is the fact that phase change, it's called a phase change material. It has. It takes so much more energy to get it to change its phase than it does to get it moving a degree. So It'll stay at 70 degrees way longer. And all this circles back to the concept of my render farm. So I figured if I make enough of this shit and stuff my render farm full of it, It'll stay at 70 degrees because there's so much ice, but warm ice, Glauber's ice.

[Wade]

So I don't know enough about thermodynamics to like really contribute to this. But what you're saying sounds. So basically what you're saying is you would put all this stuff where the phase change point is right about 70 degrees. It would constantly be in and out of phase. Like it would be kind of part liquid, part frozen, because the racks would generate heat. So they would heat. But then the phase change of all the Glaubersalt salt solution goop it would extract. But Glaubers out is still a poor thermoconductor, right? So would it really.

[Mark]

When mixed with water, it becomes as good of a thermoconductor as water is. So by itself. So here's the thing, right? The weird thing about 70 degree phase change material is if you think of the world we live in, at night, it usually gets below 70 degrees most

[Wade]

in a lot of places.

[Mark]

Even in the desert, it can get down because the sun is not shining and is cold. It will freeze overnight if it's in an environment where it can for free. Anyway, Glaubersalt is cheap. So the thing is, if I get an industrial cook thing, pot, an industrial boiler pot.

[Wade]

I mean, the industrial boiler probably implies that it's a very large pot for boiling stuff. I don't know.

[Bob]

Hey, Siri, what's a kitchen?

[Wade]

So, Mark, if Glaubersalt is such a magical cheap material that is so simple to implement, why hasn't anyone else done this?

[Mark]

Well, I don't know.

[Wade]

That's fair.

[Mark]

I don't know what it is about it, but ever since I heard about glabrous salt, I can't stop thinking about it. And it's not even that. It's the Glaubersalt really, it's like. I don't know if there's a name for the mixture of what it is afterwards. But that's science. Like, you can do the science. I just need to figure out a way to make a 422kg of it.

[Wade]

I think the thing for me that I'm sticking on is the point is not. I'm with you, that it freezes at such a high temperature that basically freezes for free, but then it's a solid. Right. Or it's a. It's a goop. Anyway. The way water. The way water cooling works is the heat is not dissipated just because water absorbs. Absorbs heat. It's dissipated because water absorbs heat and then is cycled away from the electronics.

[Mark]

Yeah, but that's not what I'm doing. If I put it in the room and then put a fan on it and blow the air.

[Wade]

But you're. But. But heat. Heat saturation is a thing. The whole. The whole thing will. You don't shut down server farms overnight, do you? Part of the point is they sort of run 24 7. Is there a downtime?

[Mark]

It'll be fine. It'll be fine.

[Wade]

Are these like, you change out the Glaubersalt packs or something with.

[Mark]

No, no, that'd be too heavy.

[Wade]

No. So, Mark, what if you glaubursalt solution your high, high freezing point solution with mineral oil and then you submerge your stuff in a glaubursal mineral oil tank so that then you don't have to cycle it. The phase change occurs and as the heat builds up, the phase changes out, but then it cut like it freezes. It's like an expanding, contracting water cooling rig.

[Mark]

I love that, and I think that's incredible. However, I feel like it would mess up with the freezing point if it would mixed in mineral oil.

[Wade]

Yeah, I have no idea what the freezing point of mineral oil actually is. I don't know how that's different. I know it's not water.

[Mark]

So what I was going to do is I'm going to make an evaporative cooler. So I'm going to McMaster car and I'm going to buy a bunch of duct work and I'm going to get some ventilation fans and it's going to build a little evaporative cooler and the cool air from there is going to blow over the Glaubersalt mixture and I'm going to have a heat exchanger inside there that's going to be like basically encapsulated by all of the glauber salt mixture and then some working fluid running through that. Go into another heat exchanger inside the render farm room and a fan on that blasting all of that delicious cold, free air conditioning, baby. Well, not free. It costs a lot to build it and all that stuff.

[Wade]

Yeah. So it's, it's essentially a normal water cooling setup with extra stuff that's definitely going to go wrong.

[Mark]

It's clover salt. It's clover salt. You got to have faith in the glover.

[Wade]

Are you getting custom like heatsink blocks for all your little chipsets and cards and things or are you just sort of setting it near it?

[Mark]

No, I'm not. You keep thinking I'm going to slather my electronics in glaub result. No, it's just air. It's just air, okay?

[Wade]

It's just air circulation. You're just using the salt solution to cool the air to a crisp.

[Mark]

It's a, it's a cold battery. It's a battery of coldness, but room temperature coldness. How is small for you guys?

[Bob]

How's it been?

[Mark]

You know how it be? Every day another failure. Every day I rise, grind, fall flat on my ass. This render farm is never happening. I swear to God, everything I've tried, I, I. Fuck you not. It is not going good. I thought I knew computers. I've assembled three different computers. Let me just say, don't buy cheap shit on ebay. Half of it doesn't fucking work. Oh no, you don't have any support, you don't have any backup. You can't return it because it's coming from a city I can't even pronounce. And then the latest adventure was in my adventures, water cooling. Right? I've never built a water cooled computer with a custom loop before, but I was like, hey, I went to engineering school, I can do this. And I, I set up everything. I made sure that I actually got parts that I could verify, like accounts still on ebay, still discounted, but there was like someone I could communicate with and I got parts. And then I sourced all of my water cooling stuff from a company that's actually here in LA who was very helpful. I asked for a lot of advice and they got, gave me guidance and I put it all together and I turned it on and I started filling the reservoir with liquid and I'm, I go through two bottles and I'm like, wow, the guy only said I need one. This is a thirsty machine. And when I get through the second bottle, this pump just keeps chugging. This liquid, I'm like, damn, it's going. And then I finally notice it's a clear liquid. So I note it's so dense with components that I didn't notice the entire bottom is swimming in the fluid. Somewhere in the loop there was a catastrophic leak and it was just gushing so it would go through the pump, boosh out.

[Wade]

Did it ever occur to you that at no point did it start coming in the return to the reservoir? You didn't.

[Mark]

You know, now that I'm thinking about that, it should have been obvious, but I never built one before. So I was like, wow, this is crazy.

[Bob]

So you doubled the amount it recommended. You were just, man, this is thirsty.

[Mark]

That was your thought. I don't know the server right now. I took all the electrical components out of it besides the power supply. I just so happened to grab the power supply that was. Makes a clicking sound with the fan like I don't know what kind of trailer. All of my shit fell off of that. I bought don't buy discount shit on ebay. It's not worth it. It's not going to be worth it. It won't. It's so many nightmares. I've wasted so much money. I should this company because holy shit,

[Bob]

I just gave you points for the drowned farm. Also for listeners out there, he pointed to a shirt that says Stiger Dynamics.

[Mark]

Yes, Stiger Dynamics. Oh, you like the listeners now. And what's. What sucks also is like I've been. I've been doing this. I run into all these little problems. So this is actually a 4090.

[Bob]

He's holding a 4096.

[Mark]

4090 graphics card that I have unmounted from its previous cooler and put this nice thin one slot cooler. Cooler, right. It's one slot. That's what it's. It says there's only one.

[Wade]

It'll looks a little wide.

[Mark]

It's. No, it's one slot. This son of a. Is not one slot by 2 millimeters. It was all. Everyone said this was a one slot cooler. The company that made it then came out with another for this exact board, the reference board that this is a more expensive one that is actually one slot. And I contacted them, I and. And I said, hey, is this available? And they said yes, but you have to order a minimum of 100.

[Wade]

Jesus Christ.

[Bob]

100?

[Mark]

I said. I didn't respond. I haven't responded.

[Bob]

How expensive are these, if I May ask?

[Mark]

The 4,090 themselves are fairly expensive. So this is.

[Bob]

I mean the one slot one.

[Mark]

The one slot thing I got for this thing was 100 and I believe 60 plus tax and something like that. So 160 bucks for the cooling block itself. But if you know a 4090, it goes from a three slot card down to one. And I was like that.

[Wade]

Which would be awesome.

[Mark]

It would be awesome if it fucking did the thing that it said.

[Bob]

Well, if you buy a hundred of them, it will.

[Mark]

You're right. I sure will.

[Wade]

The solution is to buy more stuff, Mark. Then the new stuff you buy will work probably. And if it doesn't, then you could just go buy other new stuff and that'll be the stuff that works.

[Mark]

And it's like all of this is an attempt to save. Save money. Everything I've done is an attempt to save money. I have lost so much money. Well, I haven't lost it, right? Because I could sell this again. And that's fine. It's just work to do that. The. The other computers that all crashed at once. Dell also extremely unhelpful. And then the episode that, where I talked about came out. Suddenly they wanted to help so badly and I'm just like, interesting. Whatever, guys.

[Bob]

Hey, you can't have eggs without breaking a few. Few eggs.

[Wade]

Yeah.

[Mark]

So I could technically sell this and this is still useful to, to people. It's still useful to me. Like it. It's still like. Okay, you can put this in a loop. This still works fine.

[Wade]

Yeah. That's a normal 4090, right? That's not like a, like a workstation one or something weird where it won't. Won't do video games or normal computer shit.

[Mark]

Perfectly normal 4096.

[Wade]

And.

[Mark]

And actually I could probably sell it for more than I, I paid for it because I've modified it in a way that's valuable.

[Bob]

Yeah.

[Wade]

With the water block. That's actually pretty sweet.

[Mark]

Well, just so you know, anybody, if I sell it, it's not one slot.

[Wade]

Only if your slots. Two millimeters too thin. Like Mark. Slots.

[Mark]

Right. Why don't you get girthier slots?

[Wade]

You got the wrong slots, Mark.

[Bob]

Why don't you just increase the gap a little bit?

[Mark]

I'll just stretch my motherboard out a little. I don't really have a story to tell other than we're so back, baby. Buying random computer parts off of ebay is the successful way to do everything. You know how I said that it wasn't it is it? We're back in.

[Wade]

Oh, shit.

[Mark]

We're so back. We're so back. Because I have not had one success. Wait, that sounds bad. I Have had not just one success.

[Bob]

I have not had one success.

[Wade]

Not a single goddamn success.

[Mark]

Oh, I've not had a single. I've had a double. I have now two functioning dual processor computers that I built myself, one of which is right here. And I'm gonna show you guys.

[Wade]

I'm so excited for this.

[Mark]

Jesus Christ. Oh, my God. This is one of them.

[Wade]

Jesus Christ. That's enormous.

[Bob]

They're so portable.

[Wade]

Marcus lifting up a very large looking computer for the listeners.

[Bob]

It looks like he stuffed a wig inside.

[Wade]

Oh, wow.

[Mark]

That's one of them.

[Wade]

That's large. That slides into our server rack of some port, some type.

[Mark]

Yeah, so it's a server case.

[Wade]

It doesn't seem to be plugged into anything. How do you know it works?

[Mark]

I plugged it in before. I just don't have it on right now. Because in this room, if I have both it and this computer on, it'll blow a circuit.

[Wade]

Oh, fun.

[Bob]

How many did you build total so far?

[Mark]

2. This one is dual processors that I got off ebay.

[Wade]

Are those like, xenon processors or whatever? Like server ones?

[Mark]

Yeah. So these are. They're actually these ones right here. So.

[Bob]

These.

[Mark]

Ooh. I got these for, like, less than 10% of the price of what they retail for. I don't know how and I don't care.

[Bob]

Well, just wait two weeks when they stop working.

[Mark]

No, no.

[Bob]

Didn't you build, like, five of these and you had to send them to Stigian?

[Wade]

I'm sorry, what?

[Bob]

To look at them. You were like, help me.

[Wade]

Are you trying to say Steiger Dynamics, our favorite computer company?

[Mark]

God fucking damn it, dude.

[Bob]

I hate words. Yeah, that's it. Didn't they. Didn't they help?

[Mark]

Yeah, they're helping.

[Bob]

Okay, so is this a separate computer or one of the ones they looked at?

[Mark]

This is a separate one. Yeah. So we're working in tandem.

[Bob]

I'm just trying to follow the timeline.

[Mark]

Yeah. So what I. What else? I did the second one. I have an 8 GPU server out in my storage. There was no way that I could fit 8 4090s unless I change the cooling block.

[Bob]

Right.

[Mark]

So what I've been doing is I've been putting these water cooling blocks on them.

[Wade]

The ones that were, like, 2 millimeters too thick or whatever it was.

[Mark]

Yeah, those are two too thick, but that's not it. It's not too thick for that one. Water cooling, that whole thing would take a whole thing. So what I realized is the actual 4096 I have, if you take off the fan off the top of it, the actual radiator is less than two slots. There's no fans on it, but it's less than two slots. There are these stands on the sides of it that go up past two slots. All I got to do is cut those off. I take some scissors, and I'm like, it must be plastic. Not plastic, metal. Grab a Dremel, put the metal cutting head on it. Metal dust everywhere, all in the electron.

[Wade]

That's really good for electronics. Yeah.

[Mark]

Airbrush blasted it out. First one done. Not gonna do that again. For the seven others. Go to Home Depot. Grab tin snips. Because I'm like, I bet they're aluminum. Not aluminum, steel. So you squeeze really hard with the tin snips and you bend it back and forth. It'll break eventually.

[Wade]

Then you got these real jagged, scrapey posts on the edge of your cheapie.

[Mark]

Oh, so sharp. So razor like, after it would break off. It wouldn't break off. Like, it would limply fall over. It would go. And they would go flying in a random direction. It was crazy. So seven of those went by, and I fit eight GPUs into this server. And at this point, I decided to Google if I was doing this right.

[Wade]

Nope.

[Mark]

I tried to calculate the thermal capacity of these cards. If they were just purely passively cooled, what the airflow would need. And then I couldn't find an answer. So I said, I bet it be good enough. And I turned the server and it worked. It fucking worked. I was watching the temperatures. So long as I kept the power of the cards individually, you can limit the power. They're normally 450 watt a card, which at eight cards is about 3,600 watts or 3.6 kilowatts. But if you limit the power to a reasonable level, like 33% of what it should be, it works.

[Wade]

Oh, that's fine. You don't need to use all the power.

[Bob]

Why not just use three cards at full?

[Mark]

No. The only reason that I have a 33 right now is because it'll blow a fuse. But the reason with 4090, that math weighed a lot of people on my member mixer pointed out. It doesn't matter because the 4090 is already an overpowered card. So at 450 watts, it's actually not as efficient as it could be if you lower it. And there's tech YouTubers that have done analysis of this, you can lower the power target to 60% and only lose 10 to 15% of performance. So you gain a huge power saving up to 33% for about 10 to 15% performance loss, which is great. It's actually phenomenal. And it's because the 4090 was overpowered. They, they put the power target so high, it's like it's already overclocked as the design comes in. But if you bring it down, you'll get barely a dip in performance. If you're gaming, it would be imperceptible. If you're doing rendering tasks, it's the matter of like a few seconds, like longer, and you can make it work. And I'm making it work. The render format is happening.

[Wade]

Yay.

[Bob]

What are you gonna render once it's all done? What are you making?

[Mark]

My movie stuff.

[Wade]

Like balls and water and stuff.

[Mark]

I'm gonna make the greatest, Most High Fidelity 3D porn the world has ever seen.

[Wade]

Yes.

[Mark]

Yes.

[Bob]

I might still have the computer tower that has. What was that game Yifalicious on it somewhere if you want it back.

[Mark]

Don't have publicly.

[Bob]

Oh, I mean, what's porn? Is that Jake Gyllenhaal's new movie? Well, congrats on your functional render farm. How many, how many more are you going to make? Like how many? How big will this get?

[Mark]

So they Stagger Dynamics is working on six computers that have, are going to be like the base render nodes. I've actually been talking to the people at Houdini so that they, they can know how best to set this up. Stagger Dynamics can know how best to set this up in terms of networking. But I've also been working with them because I'm trying to get more CPU power. CP power is like the thing for fluid simulations. The GPUs are great for rendering the actual final Images, but the CPUs are necessary for any kind of physics simulation stuff. There might be a time in the future where that's not true, but right now you can get CPUs a lot cheaper than anything else because of the way that it's, it's structured for simulations right now. And because everyone's crazy for GPUs right now. So that's why the professional level GPUs that actually fit in those cases are way too expensive. So if I can fit a 4090. Oh, the back of the, the back of the server can't cl flows because the 49ers are too tall. It looks real jank, but it works.

[Wade]

That just improves airflow. I'm pretty sure.

[Mark]

It sure doesn't. Especially when you got only passively cool cards. But I'M gonna. I'm gonna, like, tape off the sides where, like, the triangle of it goes up like this, and. And I'm gonna tape off the side. So it actually does kind of still go towards the back.

[Wade]

Oh, is it. Oh, it's supposed to be drawing, and that opens up a big leak in the ic. No, all you need is just get some box fans and just aim those right. Right in there.

[Mark]

You're right. You're right.

[Bob]

Or get a spray bottle when it gets too hot. Just.

[Wade]

Yeah, get the stuff you're allowed to put your electronics into. What's that?

[Mark]

What do we.

[Wade]

What was that called? Dielectric fluid. Just spritz it with a little dielectric juice. Cool it right off.

[Mark]

So you guys know how I'm trying to do this stupid server room render farm thing, right? Yeah. In my genius, I was like, I'll buy some more solar panels, because right now you can actually get them for fairly affordable rates. The prices have come down, dude.

[Wade]

Everything is so cheap in Mark's world. What. Where you live. That every.

[Mark]

Every.

[Wade]

Servers are cheap, processors are cheap.

[Bob]

He's Markiplier, so he has his own version of ebay he can log into where everything's just discounted for him.

[Mark]

If you buy refurbished things, you. You can get them at cheaper prices. Way cheaper. And they're only partially used. Solar panels are good for 25 years, and they lose. They have a rating of how much power drop that they'll experience over a period of time.

[Bob]

The quality is so much worse, though. I bought used. Used dinner, and it was terrible.

[Wade]

Yes. I'll have the refurbished rib eye and the potatoes off that lady's plate over there.

[Mark]

The thing is, like, if you get things, you get them refurbished, and you do. You put some DIY spirit into there. You can get things at pretty good rates. Now, that being said, I am. I am spending more because I'm investing in building something. That's why I'm doing it. I bought solar panels, right? And so you can read online that this solar panel is, like, 65 inches by 44 inches, is about the dimension of this panel. And I'm like, okay, that's. I got that size in my head. I ordered. You can order them by the palette. You get bulk pricing. And I'm like, okay. I mathed out. I think that this area could cover about 28 to 30 maybe solar panels, depending on how I arrange it. There's a palette here. It says 31 refurbished, high quality, barely a few years old. I'll get it that pallet weighs 1,680 pounds. And my hero of a FedEx freight person got it delivered down my driveway. Oh, how.

[Bob]

Look, one guy is like looking at his chart, he's like, oh, no, your

[Wade]

driveway is treacherously steep. I cannot imagine.

[Mark]

I was ready. I told them I was ready. Yeah, just put out the top. I'll bring them down one at a time. And even then, if I had deal with that, I would be looking at a nightmare because 65 inches is 5 foot 6.

[Wade]

That's taller than you.

[Mark]

No, no, it's shorter than me.

[Wade]

Okay. It's. It's half an inch shorter than you. You're right.

[Bob]

It's close enough where I had to think about it.

[Mark]

But they're very large, right? If. If it was in this room, the pallet would take up like 70% of the room.

[Wade]

Oh, Jesus. God, that's annoying. Enormous.

[Bob]

Well, yeah, 31 things that are basically five and a half feet by what, four feet?

[Wade]

Ish. They're all as, almost as tall as Mark and wider than I am, which is to say extremely wide.

[Mark]

Yeah, they're huge. They're enormous. And I have to haul them up on my roof.

[Bob]

It's really nice of you to put all that power right back in the grid and not get any for yourself though.

[Wade]

Yeah. You're not gonna hook those up to your house, right? You're just gonna keep. You're just gonna send that juice into the grid.

[Mark]

Yeah, that's what I just do in my public duty. You really, really gotta do it for the people.

[Bob]

I imagine some poor guy working on a power line. And then Mark just plugs this thing in like a Christmas tree and all of the power goes flying. This guy like hermit scream. Well, Wilhelm.

[Wade]

The line bulges as the tsunami of power comes down the line at him. Like a cartoonist is like, the guy's

[Mark]

like, oh, no, I gotta get down.

[Wade]

Lightning bolts. Wearing sunglasses. Sunglasses are coming out the sides. Some of them have guitars playing rock and roll songs.

[Mark]

That was small talk. That was all small talk.

[Wade]

That's what I did yesterday. Mark, what do you think we're talking about? You bought 10 kg of some unknown metal and I. I can't wait for the subreddit post.

[Mark]

I can't believe Mark bought 10 kg coin of silver. What I do, it's how you turn

[Bob]

on the render farm. You turn to put it in the slot.

[Wade]

It's coin operated. It's very expensive.

[Mark]

Oh yeah, they got me.

[Bob]

And you pull a big lever and then you render.

[Mark]

That'd be great if I could Set it up that way.

[Wade]

I'd like to render a ball floating in water. Cherry. Cherry.

[Mark]

Oh, Bar. Adobe crashed. I'm doing good. My render farm is rendering. It's very powerful and it takes a lot of electronics, electricity.

[Bob]

You're in the future now, so maybe it takes less, no more.

[Wade]

But you got your solar all fixed, probably, right?

[Mark]

I didn't. I bought a 30 foot pole. But then I hesitated. Or I didn't hesitate. I didn't hesitate at all. That's the wrong word. Forget I said that word. I underestimated how unwieldy a 30 foot pole is, because when you have extended all 30ft, it's not only extremely heavy at that mechanical leverage disadvantage, but also the, the. The pole itself just, just droops all the way everywhere. And so it's really easy to whack it on things. And you know, solar panels aren't exactly the most.

[Bob]

They've got things to help with droopy poles.

[Mark]

What?

[Bob]

Viagra not sponsored. I don't think.

[Mark]

You don't think?

[Bob]

I don't know. It's the future, man. Who knows?

[Mark]

I've been also working on the render farm and I know I've disparaged Linux users before and I will continue to do so. It doesn't make a goddamn bit of sense, you open source bastards. I hate it. I can't even log into my NAS from Ubuntu. I tried to install Fedora and it blew up on installation marender. Pretty much. And then I. Then I installed Fedora's server client and I. After the full installation process, I'm greeted with a DOS command prompt and I'm like, I left this behind in 1990 for commander. So yeah, I'm doing that because the alternative is Windows Server. And I don't know if you know how much Windows Server costs, but it can cost upwards of $7,000 per license, per LI.

[Wade]

Do you need a license per machine that's on it?

[Mark]

So you don't necessarily need that one. And I don't know if that includes multiple licenses for multiple computers, but it's like with servers, I have many small versions of it and I don't know what, I don't know any of it, but I that Linux is free, so I don't have to deal with that. But also it's.

[Wade]

It's Dracula.

[Bob]

Oh, I love Count Dracula.

[Mark]

Blah blah. I auditioned for the movie. Think if we get in blue,

[Bob]

it's

[Wade]

like a Christopher Nolan dragon. Like we're going for dark and gritty. Dracula's been through a Lot. And whenever you're ready. I'm Dracula.

[Bob]

Jared Leto as Dracula.

[Mark]

So my small talk is the same as it's always ever been. Is just about the render farm. I have solved water cooling.

[Wade]

Wow. Don't talk about Glaubmar salts again. Don't go there.

[Mark]

Why not? I don't need to right now. Right now I don't because it's winter, so I don't need to worry about cooling too much. Water cooling is a lot like Factorio. I was just playing that last night. Yeah, I know, right? So Factorio is about, like optimizing your, your distribution and automating things so that it all flows in a good direction. And, and you know, you can get clogs in your Factorio factory because you can have things going and then it won't go out. You to an out and an out to an in. And it needs. The belts need to be perfect. And also you don't need extraneous belts because you'll run out of space and stuff like that. Right? So water cooling has always been a very scary part of computer building to me, and I've never done it because I always worry about catastrophically exploding my computers with water. To be honest, I did that the first time. I think I told you guys the first time I did, I had to put it outside and drain it. Well, that's just because I didn't know what kind of plug I was using. It was an inset plug res outside plug. I've now successfully water cooled eight servers.

[Wade]

Damn.

[Mark]

I'm really proud of that. I've. I've got custom blocks. Well, I didn't make them, but the blocks for the CPUs, I put them in there. I created my own routing with the loop inside. A very elegant way of like the tight angles and stuff like that. Because if you go to a server manufacturer and you buy their proprietary water cooling solution, it's thousands of dollars. Thousands of dollars. But the block I got is 60 bucks, right? So it's 60 bucks for that, 60 bucks for another one. And then the pie connectors are like five bucks a piece. You need dozens of them. You need way more than you'd ever think. And if you get the quick disconnects, they get pricier. But I did it all, and it works. And I set up the, the quick disconnects properly so that if I ever need to do maintenance, I pop them out. No water goes anywhere.

[Wade]

Like dry brakes. You mean like specific?

[Mark]

Exactly. Yeah. So they're, they just like couple and they uncouple really easily. So I pop all those out. The only thing that I didn't. I don't understand is there is some liquid physics going on that don't make any sense to me because I know the general principle is like, you need put the fluid in when you're filling it, and then air rises to the highest point in there and it'll. You know, you want to vent that, so you can always fill it. So you want where you're filling it to be the highest point and then it goes down. But what they don't tell you. Well, they probably do, but I didn't read it. Is the way the. The loops can sit and go up and down. Also create, like, mini high and low points in the loop. It's like the false vacuum thing in the universe where they say we're resting at what we think is the base point, but actually we're going to all collapse into nothingness. And what happens with that is pressure can start to build up explosively inside these tubes. I haven't had anything explode except where I was filling it in so many times. It's like Old Faithful. I watch as it goes in. I see an air pocket come back up and it sounds. It sounds like it's rumbling. And I have to put my finger over the thing or else it's going to push water up from behind it before the air gets there. So I push that. And then once I look at the tube and I see the air is like filtered to the top, then I let it go. It goes.

[Wade]

It's just like.

[Mark]

It's a very strange. It doesn't feel like building computers at all. It feels like a. It feels like I'm a car mechanic just like, trying to cobble the other. This is very fun. And water just going every. I've ran through so many rolls of paper towels, I've lost more fluid than I've put into the thing. But not in the computers.

[Bob]

You've probably spent thousands of dollars on

[Mark]

this, on the parts.

[Bob]

No, I was joking.

[Mark]

Oh, I see.

[Bob]

I'm at like, negative 10 points to start this episode. It's not a great start for me.

[Mark]

No, come on. It was funny, man. I laughed.

[Wade]

I thought it was very funny. I was just being respectful and being quiet.

[Bob]

Thank you.

[Mark]

We love this episode. We love this episode. I've not even done anything yet.

[Wade]

I've never built custom water loop stuff, but I've watched lots of videos on it. That's. That's very funny. Also, you have dry brakes, so you could use like a. Like A pick or something to sort of like open the dry brake and bleed the air from your little pockets that you have.

[Mark]

Probably I could. I just worry about breaking any kind of O ring or seal inside there or jamming a mechanic or mechanism in there. And then suddenly I got like, oh, o ring break.

[Bob]

No.

[Mark]

Do you have trauma about O rings? Probably.

[Wade]

They make like a dry bleed connection, like dry brake bleeder where it's like you can connect it to the dry brake and it's the right connection, but then it's just a bleeder that opens to the atmosphere or something.

[Mark]

I bet they do. One of the problems with water cooling is that there's so many different manufacturers, there's so many different standards of parts. Most of the tubing that I do is 13 is 1013. It's 10 millimeters inner diameter, 13 millimeters outer diameter. Most of the actual threaded screw holes are quarter inch. Some things are very standardized, but all of them are tiny itty bitty parts that cost like five bucks a piece. And so you're like, oh, it's cheap. Ah man, I need 96 of these.

[Bob]

I wasn't wrong by it adding up to thousands of dollars. It sounds like by the end of this it does.

[Mark]

But when you think of the server thing, it's. It's like, like thousands of dollars per actual server on the rack so that it adds up way quicker for there. And in the end you would still have to hook it all up and get other stuff so it works out to be cheaper. But it's. There's something very fun to it. It's like it's the exact same difference of buying your own computer and building. Buying your own parts and building your computer or buying a pre made computer.

[Bob]

What if you buy your own parts, have someone else build your computer.

[Mark]

That costs money. Unless I do it. And then I do it for free.

[Wade]

Unless you trick Mark into doing it.

[Bob]

Hey, you guys want to.

[Mark]

Yeah, I did, but no, I felt very cool because I had a pressure tester. So whenever I would build the loop, I would have a pressure tester plug up one end, put the pressure test pump air in to test for leaks. It felt very, it felt very official. I felt very confident doing it and it was actually really fun. I haven't, I don't work with my hands a lot and I don't know, something about wrestling the pressure was very fun and super frustrating and sometimes, but very fun. Good work.

[Bob]

I listened, I paid attention.

[Mark]

Thanks, man. I have a disaster. Oh, go on. So, you know, on the last episode I was saying that my render farm is working.

[Wade]

I don't want to ruin the illusion for people but. You mean, you mean like 40 minutes ago?

[Mark]

Yeah.

[Wade]

You bragged about how your render farm was.

[Mark]

Well, I said it in there because I knew that if I got into it it would be a longer thing. So I didn't want that to be part of it. It has not been going as good as I may have suggested it was.

[Wade]

Uhhuh.

[Mark]

Oh that. Oh no, go on. This is an issue that me. And there's, there's an IT guy that's helping me out with setting some of it up. He's doing more of the like the software side, getting things to actually arranged in that capacity. And so one of the persistent problems is a server that I bought which is a density, like a high density server. It's four nodes in like a two unit thing. They're long, but it's meant to cram as much processing power into small pace as possible. The issue with that is not in me putting it together, it's not in the water cooling that I set up. Because in the compact space you need water cooling or else it's going to overheat. They're so crammed in there. And so you need an external water cooling solution. All that works. But after all that work that I've put in, and I probably put in like 100, 200 hours into just setting up those parts of it with all the water cooling pieces in there, there's still a persistent performance problem. The chips themselves are fine come back and they, all the checks come together. But what it's boiled down to is the specific server brand that it is has not put out an update to the chipset for those processors. And that's just something that is. I, I don't know if there's a way to just go directly to the intel makes the processors and go like, hey, you got drivers? Give them to me. Or if it's something where you have to kind of like figure out a way to program it in yourself. You gotta get the chipset drivers from the manufacturer of the processor and then they interact with, integrate with the board and. But there's a problem, the longer you use them, the more the performance just starts to go and then eventually it locks up so bad you can't use it.

[Wade]

How long is this? Like if you do it for a couple days, or is this like 10

[Mark]

minutes, 15 minutes is about the time it starts. That's not long enough. That's not long enough to do.

[Wade]

I was like yeah, you could just reset it every night.

[Mark]

So I thought this would have resolved. I've done like BIOS updates, I've done, you know, firmware updates. I've done every update that I can that is provided by the manual manufacturer of the server. The end result, I think, and I'm in communication to like do a big return is to do a different server platform. There's another company and I'm not naming any of them because I don't know if one works or not.

[Bob]

Okay.

[Mark]

ASUS servers, I'm going to say are the ones that are not working right now in this specific use case. They have worked in other things that I've done before. ASUS or whatever it's called. And so Gigabyte makes an equivalent product that has also the hyper hyper dense four unit thing. But I have to undo all the water cooling. I literally have to unbuild everything I've built to pull it out of the computers box. Those back up return these giant hundred pound gigantic boxes and then get new ones and rebuild all the bullshit all over again, which took me ow. Days, weeks.

[Bob]

This sounds like the kind of server I wouldn't leave a tip, but. And I always leave a tip, give them a point.

[Mark]

Just I don't know.

[Wade]

All right, all right. Mark said so have you thought about

[Bob]

talking to the server's manager?

[Mark]

I am the manager.

[Bob]

That sucks though. That really sucks.

[Mark]

It's a big pain in the ass because as far as I know, it should work. They read fine when they're working. The performance is exactly where it should be. All is lining up. It's not overheating. I even thought that it might have been one of the peripheral components in the server overheating. At one point I had a graphics card in there, a very small computer compact one. I took that out because I thought it was overheating. Apparently it was not the problem either. And no other peripheral in there because the fans are very loud. I do the water cooling also to try to quiet it down a bit. They're running at full bore and still just crashing. I think it's just because the chipset is not updated to run with those processors. There's some kind of paging file system memory system error that's building up over time that's causing like consecutive errors that run into each other and then eventually it freezes.

[Bob]

Sounds a little hey, Sus.

[Wade]

No, no, no.

[Bob]

I give myself one for whatever that's worth.

[Mark]

Well, anyway, so that's the latest. It's not all sunshine roses, but half of the other render farm is still working. It's just those hyper dense ones that are not working, which are the most recent addition and it's, it's something I can return. It's just like that's ours I don't have. Not devastating, but it's unfortunate. Just means I got to undo a lot of work and redo it, but

[Wade]

it'll probably be fine. Find it once you redo it, it'll probably work then.

[Mark]

Yeah, it probably will maybe. But I do know that the Gigabyte servers do have a late, a more recent BIOS update than ASUS did. Asus's last BIOS update is not only last year, but it's like mid last year. Whereas Gigabyte has a BIOS update that you can apply to the server as of earlier this year, which is after the processors actually launched. So I know that the old BIOS is not, is not current as of the processor's release date and these ones are on the other server are. So ideally that should work because the processors are fine.

[Wade]

Probably.

[Mark]

I never thought I'd be a truck guy. I got a Ford F150 Lightning because I looked at the specs of what it could do in terms of power delivery. The size of the battery is way bigger than the Tesla's ever were. The range is not a lie. Those Teslas all lie about their range.

[Bob]

It's.

[Mark]

It just blew my mind. I would watch it and I would go like I've traveled 10 miles. Well surely the. Oh, it's dropped 30 miles. All right, well that's fine. It said I had like a 300 mile range on my Tesla. I got 180 at best. Even when I was driving like this. It's just lies. But this one, I drive 10 miles and it's like the range estimate only dropped 8 and I'm like, oh, thank you. Oh thank you. Now hold on.

[Bob]

The Tesla wasn't lying. Someone took the road signs and spread them out further. That wasn't the Tesla's fault.

[Mark]

It's crazy because this truck has a 20440 volt plug in the back of it. I could run my render farm off of this truck. This truck has more power than all of my backup batteries that I put in my render farm by three times.

[Bob]

I want to see a Ford commercial with like a really nerdy dude driving his Ford Lightning with the render farm. He's like off roading in the mud through the woods while like, like video game let's plays or like processing in the back.

[Mark]

I, I could, I'M good. I have an update on my many hobbies.

[Wade]

Which one is it? 3D guns.

[Mark]

3D guns.

[Wade]

Ammo farm. Where are we going?

[Mark]

Look, it's about the render farm. It's been working delightfully. Finally, after four floor air conditioners, two wall air conditioners, that some bitch is actually staying at a steady temperature. But the harsh realities of operating a render farm. You built a freezer. It's not that cold, man. Even with all those, I woefully underestimated how much cooling was necessary. But I have another problem entirely. I got my power bill.

[Wade]

Oh, no.

[Bob]

Did the seven air conditioners raise it slightly?

[Mark]

It's been up and down because we've been testing it, but we haven't been running it. So the past month has been the first time. It's been like running every day. Chugging, you know, beautiful renders. My power bill was $3,000.

[Wade]

Is your solar working or.

[Mark]

Yeah, it is. I'll bet you wish you were a

[Bob]

man with five ovens instead of a man with seven air conditioners, now, don't you?

[Mark]

I opened up that let you know how they show a bar graph of your, like, monthly usage. Yeah, it was like, oh, and it's trending up as I'm testing. And then this past month was just astronomically somehow.

[Wade]

It like comically goes off the paper. You just look at it just like, you're like, what the fuck?

[Mark]

I don't know what the power company thinks is going on at this place. You know, this place being a bathroom.

[Bob]

You're going to get raided by SWAT

[Mark]

for a render farm, dude.

[Wade]

Yeah. No D.A. is going to show up and be like, the power company thinks there's a grow farm here or something. Something crazy is happening, so it must be drugs.

[Mark]

Oh, there's a farm. All right.

[Bob]

You're gonna find seven 3D printers, a server farm, seven AC units, and a bunch of 2D guns.

[Mark]

It's like a big wooden crate with

[Wade]

like the rack in it. And then just a bunch of pieces of paper with hand drawn aks on it.

[Bob]

This man's planning to raid the Looney Tunes.

[Mark]

I got a gun safe. And they're like, open this safe. I'm like, all right, I'll open it.

[Bob]

Because.

[Mark]

And just a avalanche of papers, you know, mask style with all the dollars coming out.

[Wade]

For some reason, they all have hand drawn serial numbers, but then their hands scratched out.

[Mark]

Yeah, so that's my update. And it's only going to. It not going to go down much in the next few months.

[Wade]

So they didn't say anything about that though, because like I, when we lived out there, we had, there was one, one summer where the really. One of the really bad fire summers happened. And I'm like, we had all of our closed and sealed and we were running the AC just to try and keep positive pressure on our house because it was like toxic outside. And our bill jumped by like 250%. And the power company sent the bill and then they called and we're like, are you guys okay? Are you good? And I was like, yeah, there's fires and shit. Like, I don't know, it's been awful. But they, no one, they just saw your bill and we're like, all right.

[Mark]

Well, if they did call, I didn't answer. But yeah, I feel like they're probably more. More into that.

[Bob]

They're gonna think you're a render dealer and call you el servo.

[Mark]

I had this idea a long time ago before I started building it. A long time ago. It feels like a long time ago, like a year ago. Because with the Mac studios, Apple silicon, it's very power efficient. And I did some paper math that was like the power efficiency of this cost over a period of time. The cost of this like computer going on ebay and finding random stuff. And the math showed me a year ago that the, the power cost of the actual server grade stuff would be astronomical. Lehigh. And I'm like, I must be doing my math wrong. That can't be right. And now here I am. My math was right.

[Wade]

Congratulations.

[Mark]

Oh, dude.

[Bob]

36,000 a year on power. You're saving so much.

[Mark]

My yearly power. Power bill is going to be $36,000.

[Bob]

Good math. I can tell you.

[Wade]

It's okay you're getting that back because the server farm is very profitable, I assume.

[Mark]

Well, technically it's saving me money. Technically, I think I'm deep. I think I'm deep in the red. I like, I don't want to go and do the math. I don't want to. It would have been so much better if I just hired another company. Oh, man. Oh man.

[Bob]

You factor in maintenance cost, I'm sure you're going to be well into the green.

[Mark]

Well, maintaining it. I'm not hoping to do that. I'm hoping that when it dies, it dies. And I will. Just because there's no company I can send it back to. I got it from ebay, so. And it's not like I don't think I can sell it back again.

[Bob]

So you spent a year working on this, getting it to work. You installed 70 air conditioning units. You're paying 3,000amonth and your idea is

[Wade]

when it dies, it dies.

[Mark]

I. Even now, I'm like, buying a whole. A room full of Mac studios might have been the better option.

[Wade]

How much clover salt do you need for it to die in a tragic blob assault accident?

[Mark]

Very little. If I go by that one guy on Reddit thought of what I was going to do, which was shovel inside the computers and immerse them. So very little. Anyway, sorry, I got to get a weep a little bit here.

[Bob]

I understand. I would too, if I had a $3,000 power bill.

[Mark]

Yeah, I actually in. In the. In the past two days since we last talked, I did a full redo of my whole render farm. If I take a picture of it afterwards, because I didn't take a picture of it during it, I'll send it to the editors if I remember a lot of conditions. This is never going to happen. No one's ever going to see this.

[Wade]

Editors invent a render farm, make it look awesome.

[Mark]

It still has some wires across the floor just because of where the electricians put in plugs and the fact that it is a bathroom. But it's a lot cleaner now. It works a lot better. It turns out if you don't shove something up against your. Your air conditioners that you've put in, it's able to breathe and circulate air better. So give those room to breathe. Everything's going. I got the leaning tower of Mac studios. It's great.

[Bob]

What does that mean when I picture your render farm? Don't take offense to this. I picture C3PO after he got ripped apart and is like. Like in the backpack where all the pieces are there, but there's wires and he's like heads on backwards.

[Mark]

That's how it was before. Did you. Did I not show you a picture of the before? I'm pretty sure I did. It's a dystopian. It was a dystopian, cyberpunk kind of nonsense thing. If I type server into my phone's, like, pictures, it doesn't come up. And I'm like, why wouldn't that come up? I was like, oh, yeah. Because it doesn't look anything like what they would think a server looks like. What do you.

[Wade]

What's the search term to find that picture? Post apocalyptic nightmare. Rat's nest of wires and. Oh, there it is.

[Mark]

Let me look up apocalypse. Oh, no results. Okay. Nest of wires. God damn it. Rat King. Let me look up Rat king. Nope. Yeah, man. I can't find this. It's a mystery.

[Wade]

Apple intelligence, my booty.

[Bob]

Well, it's working great after the rebuild, right? No issues.

[Wade]

Yeah. So you rebuilt it and nothing has gone wrong and it worked great perfectly the whole time.

[Mark]

Kind of. It's. It's not my fault. Of course it's not. No. I can't find the picture. Oh no,

[Wade]

no.

[Mark]

Can't find it. Anyway, it's, it's good. Except one of the things that I dislike is these small like arbitrary details about computers that you know, you have to really read the manuals to know or read in depth about reviews and anything. I'm sure a bunch of people know that if you need to populate all of the the RAM slots for server grade hardware to run at full performance, it needs all the channels filled. It's expecting that. So for a while these have been running with almost all of them full, but not all of them. For the ones that have RAM slots,

[Wade]

you can't skip any slots and. Or IT do.

[Mark]

No. Yeah, it's probably is common knowledge in the server world, but I didn't know this because I'm used to like running a PC for desktop reasons and sometimes for PCs if you have only half of them filled, it runs faster. So it's very opposite thinking, but whatever. Doesn't matter, not important. Goddamn it will be the death of me because for some reason those management ports just decided to die. They're plugged in just the same. They were plugged in before from one switch, put them into another switch, reset everything, reboot everything, and then just never picks up an IP address. Just cannot do anything. I don't get it. I don't understand how this stuff is supposed to be smart, redundant, fail safe. It just, oh no, another, another plug. I can't do it on different server. I think it's probably because I didn't let go of the fixed IP on the previous device before I moved it over. But I've done that before where devices just pick up anyway. It's a nightmare.

[Wade]

I know that you know that you could pay someone to do that, but there's a part of my brain that would love to see you like find an IT consultant or and be like, I just need you to come. I have this set up and they walk into your bathroom and they're just like oh, oh no, oh. And like they like pull out their laptop and plug in and they're like looking through the software. They're just like oh God, I'm sure it's fine, but I'm sure a professional would. There's even people who build PC, like just Towers. There's so much shit that if they looked at the way I did it and I think I do it, I mean, it works. I've never had a PC that didn't work. Got all those specs I wanted out of it. They would still probably just vomit out their entire lungs at what I did. I can only imagine for server shit, what kind of things there are that you would have no idea about.

[Mark]

There actually is a guy with Burning Tractor, which is the VFX company I work with. They have this guy Rory there, who is their IT guy. And so he. He has worked miracles for never actually stepping foot inside the server room. But every time. Time I do something, I swear to God he's. I see on Discord that Rory is typing Stop. Rory is typing Stop. Rory is. And I know it's like, stop fucking it up. You fucking delete. How dare you delete. I know that's what's going on. I know he's doing that. But, you know, what can you do?

[Bob]

Well, I think that's very relatable. We've all been there with our server farms.

[Mark]

I think we've all been there with fucking up networking. I mean, I miss the days when it was just like, you have your modem from the Internet company and I still managed to fuck that up. So what was I thinking having a whole farm?

[Wade]

Yeah, well, it doesn't make me feel good that you're doing all this shit and this is pretty high tech stuff and it's a complicated system with lots of different. And I have felt exactly the way that you feel. But it's been me on my home wifi with a modem and a router and like one smart device being like, oh, no, I connected you to the. You were on the WI fi and now you forgot. Oh, and like. But it's just me with like one light bulb being like, why won't you be blue fucking light bulb. But it doesn't make me feel good that I've been there, but with, you know, kind of a different scale of technology. Kind of different. But it's all just like that, man.

[Mark]

It's weirdly applicable because the things I've learned are actually like, in the IT world. They're like common knowledge for. Oh, no, there he goes. He had it with our tech talk.

[Wade]

Wade speaking. Thanks for the subreddit.

[Mark]

But it's common knowledge apparently in IT land. But, you know, if you want your home network to work better, virtual networks are the way you create a sub network just for your devices and Internet of Things. And then you create specific rules that those connect to each other and then to your other virtual network where you operate your normal Internet connection so it's separated and you don't have any cross traffic from that one in your network.

[Wade]

What the fuck are you talking about? About.

[Mark]

Yeah, don't. Don't do it. I tried to. I tried to do a vlan. I took down my whole network for two days. I don't. Don't touch the VLAN button.

[Wade]

It's not. I'm not going to. There's a part of me that's like, oh, that would be so sick though. Because then there wouldn't. No, it would not be sick. It would be horror. It would be awful. It would be like taking another full time 40 hour a week job at a thing I don't know how to do, and I don't need that in my life.

[Mark]

What I should do is I should render a 3D model of his basement and use my render farm to simulate poop while water explode. I wish you got really good at

[Wade]

making the ocean go.

[Mark]

I know, but using my computing power to make those infographics like, you know, news documentaries are like Discovery Channel shit. They have a 3D rendering of what's happening. Wait, I'm gonna make a 3D rendering of your basement and I'm a show just poop water just. And. And you just like, you know.

[Bob]

Thank you.

[Mark]

What?

[Wade]

What was the noise, Wade?

[Bob]

Well, shit is on the move out there, but thankfully it's just Molly cleaning up after the cat.

[Wade]

Okay, I want to phrase that differently. Shit is on the move out there. Thankfully, it's just Molly. But you know, so many things you've done. So much cool stuff.

[Mark]

I bear. Apparently I don't even know the beginnings of it because my, my, my render farm is very powerful, but it still isn't woefully under like, you know, the Nvidia CEO, what he's talking about, the. The more you buy, the more you save. With his $10,000 graphics cards while he's. He's hawking a server rack that's as big as bigger than the shelf behind me that probably cumulatively in the whole rack costs like $10 million. And that's just to go really fast.

[Bob]

You need a render cooperative or a render collective farm.

[Mark]

What, what is that?

[Bob]

A group of farms?

[Wade]

Those are types of farms.

[Mark]

You know, like a ground plowing kind of farm is a co op kind of deal.

[Wade]

What a name that Would be though, the render Collective.

[Bob]

This is my render cooperative. I have 16 garages each stacked with

[Wade]

every bathroom in every building. I have access to stuffed full of stuff, full of servers.

[Bob]

I am a man with 10 garages of render farm.

[Mark]

I have some tech complaints, but, you know, those are always hit or miss.

[Wade]

I love when Mark moans about technology and so does everyone on the separate Reddit universally.

[Mark]

All right, so I do have a few complaints. All right. Okay.

[Wade]

Okay.

[Mark]

I had another fiber line pulled to my render farm. Right. You know how. How basic do I need to break this down? Line of fire.

[Bob]

Damn.

[Wade]

Are you asking me or Wade?

[Mark]

Because if anyone has an objective because you.

[Wade]

It's a line the Internet comes in on and goes out on for a lot of people.

[Mark]

Actually not as many of their should be. Most people have cable, which is still copy.

[Wade]

Everyone's Internet touches fiber optic at some point. It just. Usually there's a junction at some point where it switches from your hardline to your fiber optic. But yeah, it's the Internet. It's the fast kind, so you can

[Mark]

get your own fiber going between yourself. You could set up your whole house networking with fiber if you really wanted to, you could do that and it would be very fast, efficient networking. It's just that they're very fragile and

[Wade]

you hated having money in your bank account.

[Mark]

Yeah, yeah. And you. If any rat. Rat even touches a wire to crack it in half or they'll nibble on it. And. Oh, interest gone.

[Bob]

Oh, an actual rat. I thought you meant, like a really shitty person.

[Wade]

Any of you.

[Mark]

I'm gonna rule you with fear or I'm gonna rule you with love. And you're not gonna like that. Anyway, so anyway, I started shooting my ceiling fiber. I had it two because I wanted a redundancy because there's. There's a single connection going to my render farm right now. And if that breaks, then no one can use it or I have to go in there. But there's no computer set up in there. It's all remote access. Right. So if that breaks even, I can't use it because I. Hell, my computers are. You know, I access it remotely.

[Bob]

Yep.

[Mark]

So I had another fiber line pulled, and this one I was like, I want hundred gigabit lines, 100 gigabit. Because I was like, I'm sure that

[Bob]

was cheap to install.

[Mark]

Well, it's actually not that much more. The. The most cost is in laying the. The. The conduit and pulling it through.

[Bob]

I guess that's fair.

[Mark]

The. The cable may cost like twice as Much per foot or something like that. But still most of the work is in the labor of getting it from A to B. So they did it. I had them dig it really nice and the, the whole pipe. And then, you know, it gets all said and done and I go to the server closet and I look at the cable and I'm like, pick up the other cable that they put in this 10 gigabit one. And I hold him up next to each other. I'm like, fuck, it's. They pulled two cables through this fucking enormous thing. And they're not hundred anyway, so that's the only complaint I have about that. And this is more of a complaint with a particular company than anything. But it's like, I'll say this thing, I'll say these things and like the people that you'll come to the house because it's like a house. And they're like. And I'll say I want 100 gigabit. And they're like, nobody needs 100g. That's crazy. I want a jillion gigabits. This guy. Okay, yeah. All right. And so they're like, I'll just pull this fiber, which is perfect.

[Bob]

At this point you have like three government satellites aimed at your house at all. Probably, Probably.

[Mark]

I have, I have an unbelievable amount of random going on here. And to confirm. The bear. Yeah, yeah, the bear. Yeah, the bear. Could things up real fast. Anyway, I was just like, God, I. I just wish people would take me seriously sometimes because I'm saying what I mean, I am. I don't know everything, everything about everything I'm doing. But when I say I want 100 gigabit and they'll say like, well you, you need to get really expensive infrastructure to even handle 100 gigabit. And then I go, I know.

[Wade]

Way ahead of you, dude.

[Mark]

I have it. Plugging it into the thing. Anyway, I have a render farm update. It's not going to be exciting.

[Bob]

I'll take a nap immediately.

[Mark]

So in my experience, I have had many ups and downs with the render farm, especially in terms of like how to get the computers in there, what format. And I'm circling back to this crazy thing that's going to make a lot of people mad.

[Wade]

Glaur salts.

[Mark]

No, no, no. Okay, don't even need it. I've. I've very much become like no water cooling at all unless it's like an all in one. And even then I would rather have an air cooler because it's just going to be consistent at least I guess that the fan fails, but usually you can have two on them and whatever. I was so proud of my ability to go on ebay and find these crate. Wade. Nah, it's fine. I was so proud of my ability to go on ebay, you know, much like the Cincinnati Bengals.

[Bob]

Cincinnati.

[Wade]

I was just gonna write a sign that said Wade loses a point for every minute he sleeps while Mark talks. So you woke up.

[Mark]

Anyway, anyway, so I did not know this, but you know the intel chip that everyone seemed to not review very well that I've been like, it's actually very good. They make a workstation grade motherboard for that that takes error correcting ram and it's the same fucking price as a normal. Well, a high end, but a high end normal desktop motherboard. And why this is huge is error correcting RAM is very important on a server, especially if we're running a long time. Is because when it's doing calculations that are very precise, it needs to not have wrong numbers in the memory. That leads to bad issues. And it's. There's a lot of reasons why it would happen, why it doesn't happen. But error correcting RAM corrects it and so it makes it really, really uncommon for those to happen. But it's also stupendously cheaper than the. Even the discounted server hardware I was getting online. It is stupendous and it's more power efficient and it's like. And I look at a. Like, what was I thinking with this stupid render farm. So, yeah, I'm going to be overhauling it because now that iron lung is wrapping up, I'm going to, I'm going to get it out of my bathroom. I'm going to get it out of the bathroom and then I'm going to move it so that it could be. Because it was always a stopgap. It was always like, this is urgent. I got to do this right here in this bathroom. There's no other place to do it apparently. And then, you know, then one thing led to another. But I'm going to be moving it, I'm selling stuff and then I'm going to convert it to a much more optimized streamline. And this is once again where I'm like, people like, again, you just don't be loyal to AMD or Intel. Buy what is useful in the moment. And holy shit, I can. Like, they're so discounted because no one wants to get them because the two frames per second, it gets less than the other ones. Who cares? It is such a good Productivity chip, it's so good I'm doing overhaul of that so I've got some computer parts coming in.

[Wade]

Well, that's fun.

[Mark]

It's very fun.

[Wade]

I'm.

[Mark]

I've already sold a couple things back, so technically I'm up. Except I paid for them before, so I'm. But you know.

[Wade]

But you got that money back. Full price, I'm sure. Yo.

[Mark]

Yeah. Oh yeah, man. People are tearing apart my render farm on, on like the subreddit Homeland. People are really not. People are. And I shared the picture because I know it's bad guys. I know.

[Bob]

Oh wait, that was real. That was a real picture.

[Mark]

Yeah, no, that's. It's just like look guys, it was a. I learned as I went it's not pretty, but fuck, it works. Look guys, it works. It. That shit fucking flies. And people need to understand it's not just for like rendering video or encoding video. That's always for. It's not even just for rendering the CG scenes which can do very well. It's purpose built for distributed simulations. Simulations needle the computer power and to do it efficiently. This is the best way that I've gotten so far to do it. It's not the best way ever. It's the best way I could manage myself. And let me tell you, all those people out there that were like, why didn't you hire a professional to do this? I tried. They came in and I said, yeah, I want to put a server in my bathroom. And then they go fuck you. And they leave. They don't do it. They don't do it. So yeah, that's it. So my, my childhood thing actually that I do still to this day is something that I cultivated again because I was building the render farm. And I know that sounds weird, but my dad always had computers every, ever since I was a kid. And so for a very long time I was the type that was like, he got computers, magazines, he got like the micro center mall like advertisement thing. And so I would, after he was done with, I would go through and look like, oh yes, I'll take $1,000 hard drive 30. You know, this five year old me

[Wade]

is like, oh yeah, a 30 megabyte hard Dr. Whoa.

[Bob]

Oh.

[Mark]

A 10 pack of floppies for only 29.99. Well, I'll take two, you know. So now that I'm, I'm, I'm back in building render form and I'm done with the movie now, so I, now I'm just like, what computer can I upgrade? What needs an upgrade? Like, I caught a whiff that there are new intel processors coming out and it's like, oh, yeah, all right, I probably need that. I probably, I probably could do with an upgrade to my main computer. I can build an. Why not just build another one? So it's just like I just desperate, desperately looking around for anything that I can build and anything that I can tinker because it's just like, it's just tinkering with Legos but with expensive computer equipment.

[Wade]

You are a great candidate for a hobby I've been trying to teach myself about and I'm too stupid, apparently to do very well. Have you looked into Home Lab stuff?

[Mark]

I was on the Home Lab subreddit. They were making fun of my render farm.

[Wade]

Oh, they were burning your render farm.

[Mark]

They were making fun of my. Well, some of them were just like, no, wait, actually this is what this subreddit is all about. Really shitty setups. This guy, you can't make fun of him. And meanwhile, he's saying that I'm like, oh, you died. Look, I'm still getting hit here, man.

[Wade]

Seriously though, the people on the, on the Home Lab subreddit who are like scoffing at people who scrabble things together and have janky. What is a Home Lab if it's not supposed to be some janky shit where you're like, I have these weird random components, like, let me see what I can make with them. It's great. And the people who are chill about it are cool and the people who are on Reddit about it are not.

[Bob]

That janky shit held the number one movie for 71 and a half out of 72 hours.

[Mark]

Yeah, that's true, baby, that's true. What I will say is about that some people were looking at all the Mac studios and was like, oh, clearly that's not a deal. I'll tell you something about Mac. Even if you don't like it, that shit holds its resale value like crazy. And you better believe I'm gonna sell those things now that I'm done with the movie. So I only got them for, for this thing.

[Wade]

So I cannot fucking believe how expensive like an M1 Mac mini still is. Like, you'd think like, oh, that's really old, but it's an Apple silicon chip. But it's like, oh, that's like a five year old compact computer. They're like 300, 400, 500 bucks depending on the specs. It's like, what the fuck? You might as well just buy new stuff.

[Mark]

God damn, that's the crazy thing is because I bought this. I mean, it was still the AI craze, but then people discovered that, hey, these Macs are actually really good for AI bullshit. And I'm not using it for that. I'm using it for efficient rendering. But the resale value. I might make money on these.

[Wade]

Going to make money on some Mac studios.

[Mark]

It's crazy. So the render farm is no more.

[Bob]

Whoa.

[Mark]

Okay. It's a little underwhelming. It's gone.

[Wade]

I mean, it is big. It is big news, but it's. It's gone. I feel like it's been. That's just a part of life.

[Mark]

Wow. Fucking.

[Wade]

Why are you acting like you're not listening, man? I know you hear what we're talking about.

[Mark]

I am listening.

[Bob]

I'm reacting.

[Wade]

Oh, okay.

[Mark]

So, yes, the render farm has left the bathroom. I know it is a big deal.

[Wade]

And you burned it in a bonfire in your backyard.

[Mark]

I covered it in glauber salt, which, as we know, very flammable. Extremely flammable. One of the big problems that everyone was trying to warn me about when I stuffed it inside my servers.

[Bob]

It's hard to get up when you're old.

[Mark]

It's moving to an actual. Not a bathroom. Like.

[Wade]

Yeah.

[Mark]

Wait, you all right?

[Bob]

Oh, yeah. This is about me. It's about you. Go on.

[Mark]

Anyway, it's. It's moving to a place that actually should have a render farm. A server room. A real, real deal server room purpose built specifically for that.

[Bob]

Oh, fuck.

[Mark]

What is happening under his desk? What kind of mole matter tunneling up from his basement floor?

[Wade]

What the fuck is happening?

[Mark]

I just squirted water all over. Jeez, man. Don't do that.

[Wade]

I'm really trying to stick with the story of this one. Mark's render farm is going to a real room, like a big boy.

[Mark]

And I'm selling some of it because with the current computer prices and RAM prices. Don't give me that face weight very high. Oh, man, you're not lying. There's some extra stuff that I think I'll try to sell. Might even make some money off of what I got off ebay for that.

[Wade]

I don't understand what's happening with Wade. I gotta be honest, I'm super distracted right now.

[Mark]

Okay? So my. What I do right now is like, okay, let's say making movies or whatever. It's like making entertainment. That's a lot of different disciplines involved in it. That's why I constantly come out like, I bought a graphics card. Boohoo. You know, I. I built a render farm. Boohoo. You know, glover salts. Boohoo. You know, lenses. Boohoo. Does act count of like having a job that requires a bunch of skills?

[Bob]

I mean, technically it's your job, so I can't argue it. But you can never stop.

[Mark]

This is easy. I don't want to stop. I want to slide into my grave.

[Wade]

I don't think he's going to stop.

[Mark]

Yeah, slide into my grave wishing I could do more.

[Wade]

The only time you're ever going to get, Tunis Honest, is when Mark finds out he has almost exactly one year to live. And at the end of the year, Mark dies. All right, that's the channel.

[Mark]

That's not bad. Watch new episodes on Spotify.