Ok, so I had a bit of time to play with the boards this weekend and here are the promised pictures. I have 10 of them, and now have 8 of them in use and 2 to play around with more when I have time:
So you can get an idea of what they look like relative to eachother, here's the 3 DPS-2000BB breakouts that I have (including the 4k one):
While it kind of looks bigger, in reality it's not - the actual PCB on this one is 83mm x 83mm (pretty much perfectly square) as opposed to the Jabberwock one which is 100mm x 75mm. They both have 12 PCIe connectors and Jabberwocks has 6 fan connectors while this one has 3 (for my money, 3 is overkill as I usually only use one per device, but it's nice to have a few spares):
Here's the backside of the two units - not much of interest here except that you can actually see one of the layers on the blue one, whereas there's only a couple of traces fine visible on the upper left of the other:
I don't know if there's a more scientific way to determine how much copper is in these, but since they have almost exactly the same big components (PCIe plugs, PSU connector, etc), I figured taking their respective area divided by weight would probably give some indication. Interestingly, even though the blue board is smaller it's average weight per square mm is 0.012 vs 0.010, which is pretty substantial - basically the blue board is 10% smaller and 10% heavier:
This is how I typically have the 4k configured, with 2 PWM server-grade fans, slightly offset so that part of the last fan blows over the PCB. I'm also the king of zipties, so I use one monster one to hold the whole thing together - works really well:
This leads to one of my complains about the layout of Jabberwocks 4k board (neither his nor the blue single boards have this problem), and that is that because the fan headers are smack up against the switch you can't plug in a 4-pin connector. Super annoying, as they could just be reversed to solve this:
I modified my setup slightly to use these - just reversing the orientation of the PSU's, which allows the two boards to be back-to back:
There is a fair bit of space between the two boards, but I would still put a piece of acrylic or other material between them so that they can't come in contact with eachother - just to be safe:
One issue for me with reversing the PSU's is that my clever locking/alignment hole doesn't work now because it should be in the middle - but that's easy enough to solve later:
It also has a jumpered pin header (they forgot to include the jumpers, but I had some onhand so no big deal). Pretty simple - jumper in place, the on/off switch works; jumper out, the machine is off. So to setup remote rebooting, just hook up a relay, flip the switch on, and now the relay controls whether or not the PSU is on.
I have a bunch of these cheap Chinese ethernet relay boxes that I've used in the past, so being able to put them to use again is nice. You can pick them up on AliExpress for cheap and the one in this picture can power cycle 8 PSU's, making it a pretty cost effective solution for remote rebooting. I just use a script to call curl to hit the web interface on the relay box, and you're in business:
Overall my impression is that it's a really well designed board. I think the layout shows that they either actively mine or at least spent time time thinking about it. I also prefer the connector layout more than the Jabberwock board, as the square shape makes it work really well regardless of how the PSU is positioned (the Jabberwock has issues in that configuration), and personally I would prefer to have 3 fan connectors that are easier to work with than 6 jam packed next to the other. Temperature of the board is hard for me to judge since my fan setup blows air over the PCB, but I prefer to have everything run as cool as possible, so if it's better on that front then sign me up as well.
Anyway, hope that helps!
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