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by apex3stoker 1784 days ago
>I doubt its going to be mainstream anytime soon.

I would like to have a quiet and powerful machine for deep learning. The best one I found come from NVIDIA DGX station. It uses liquid cooling and is <35dB acoustics. The problem is that it is too expensive and, last I check, I think it requires buying support contract from third-party.

If liquid cooling is what it takes to have a quiet powerful machine, I hope it will be mainstream.

Source: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/Data-Cent...

3 comments

What we did in the VFX world is just use hardware VDI.

Shove in a https://www.teradici.com/ card, and bam, low latency, high colour accuracy, high resolution remote video.

This allowed us to use the huge machines that drove realtime VFX (your flames, baselite and editing rigs) in utter silence.

Enthusiast water cooling would work for you, which if you're not comfortable with yourself you can get from people like Maingear.

But unless you need 4 GPUs, even just 2 GPUs with normal modern air cooling would still be reasonably quiet.

For the overwhelming majority of consumer-oriented products, you don't need water cooling to be silent (or near-silent). Those tower coolers and triple-slot GPU coolers are really good at getting rid of the heat in a noise-efficient manner.

Why does it need to be quiet though? Don't most of these live in a datacentre with no humans around? I assume you will say you want to keep it in your office or similar, but then I'll just ask again - why exactly?
Its designed to be in the office, so having a default sound level of 75dB isn't going to be a winner.

Plus I suspect that having watercooling for that machine allows it to fit in a much smaller space. We had a machine that contained 4 RTX 2080s (or maybe the generation before) and it took up a huge amount of space, and never went at full speed, because of the cooling (those consumer cards are not designed for density.)

The DGX Station designed to run on 35dBA. So Nvidia thinks it need to be run silently because of it should be a monster workstation under your desk.