Giorgiana 6 GPU stackable... Nice concept, bad layout?
Frames are built. I'd rather be posting pictures of everything plugged in and running, however, I've run into some issues. There's absolutely no way I'm running 6 GPUs in this thing without buying even more cables or hacking the frame up.
1) Pre-drilled power supply screws are slightly too wide for my psu. So I can't mount them.
2) I don't like how the psu mounts are oriented to begin with. Your PCI-e cables essentially have to do a snake to get back around and to the top/back of the cards. My cables just aren't long enough.
3) PCI-e slot location in reference to the 6 GPU mount points: Wouldn't it make sense to center the slots to the mount points? I'm going to have to daisy chain more PCI-e risers than expected to reach the left-most mount points.
4) This could be partially resolved by closing the distance between the bottom of the cards and the motherboard. Do we really need all of that space?
5) My back left motherboard mounting post was about 1-2mm off center. Unable to screw that point down.
I'm exhausted from all of this. I actually bought some 1/2" angle aluminum tonight and am thinking about converting one of the frames into a gridseed rack.
To address each of your concerns:
1. That's by design so two PSUs can be mounted next to each other. As it says in the Component Placement section of the assembly guide: " If you have a single PSU only, you may find it convenient to connect it between the two PSU bars and screw the PSU into both support bars. This may require slightly shortening the short horizontal bars, using the same technique outlined above. If you have two PSUs, you may want to mount them next to each other, screwed into each of the PSU support bars, or on top of each other (again, this may require shortening the short horizontal bars). If you have three PSUs, you will want to mount two of them next to each other, and then screw the third into the corner PSU support bar."
2. We played around with centre-mounted PSUs, but ultimately it was more trouble than it was worth, as the PSU rests on the same crossbar as the motherboard. Additionally, it required extra connectors and created a sag-point in the middle of the back (where it is, structurally speaking, relatively weak) so it wasn't a good design for "stackability".
3. The whole point of having risers is to move the cards up and away from each other, so whilst we've tested designs with less space between cards we have found them to be sub-optimal compared to our current spacing. If we had to put the cards directly above the slots they would have no space between them, and you may as well just put them straight on the board.
4. Yes, we need all that space, as all of our existing designs convert between horizontal and vertical layouts just by changing a few connectors around (currently not detailed in the assembly guide, but see:
http://i.imgur.com/pIOIsQv.jpg /
http://i.imgur.com/3d1HpMj.jpg /
http://i.imgur.com/k2xdW2g.jpg as a reference). If we lowered the distance that would not be possible, as we'd be decreasing the "width" of a vertically laid out frame and it would no longer be stable. Also, it seems that USB-driven risers are extremely popular, so many of our customers have risers with a vertical reach of 100cm, making this and the point above a non-issue.
5. Sorry about that - the reference boards we used to drill the holes were more weirdly laid out than expected; we've recently adjusted things to accommodate that. Depending on your use case you can either ignore that mounting point, or re-drill a hole for the standoff, or just let the board sit on the standoff without being screwed in.