Laying the Groundwork

I’ve been streaming my workouts, and decided on November 20th to transition my battlestation out of my bedroom.

in yetieater v1, I streamed out of my bedroom through my workstation. My workstation was my only streaming rig, and the bulk of my gaming was done on my Xbox One.

After upgrading my father’s workstation, I held onto his old parts, and threw them into a new case: the Thermaltake Core P3 (Amazon.com). I considered migrating my workstation’s internals into the new case when it arrived on August 23rd, but decided against it because my Cooler Master XAF HB was already deeply entrenched within my setup.

The “new” machine lived inside of my home gym as a dedicated streaming machine. I ran it headless, driving it through my mid-2011 MacBook Air using AnyDesk.

I upgraded to dual 1080p webcams for my workout stream on November 4th, and the rig wasn’t keeping up with the workload, so I began running my workstation GPU (ZOTAC GTX 750 Zone Edition, Amazon.com) between the two setups. The GTX 750, using NVENC, made quick work of the dual 1080p webcam feeds, allowing me to maintain a stable 1080p30 out to stream.

The air has been growing drier here, and I was getting tired of running the GPU between the rigs. I made a couple of posts through social media letting folks know that I was looking to acquire a new GPU, and to keep me in mind as they were shopping online this holiday season, but I knew that I couldn’t depend on affiliate revenues. I recalled advice given to me by an old friend, “Do the best you can with what you’ve got!” With that, I committed to moving my best hardware to my home gym.

I swapped the internals between the two cases yesterday morning, a task that took me just under two and a half hours.

This picture was taken after I positioned my @autonomousdotai #SmartDesk2 in the position formerly occupied by the wooden table that you see in the foreground. Quite a lot of hardware for one room! ? iPhone 7 Plus

A post shared by yetieater (@the_yetieater) on Nov 21, 2017 at 12:14pm PST

I began laying out the elements that would live on my @autonomousdotai #SmartDesk2. The @thermaltakeusa Core P3 lurked beneath the wooden table for the first part of its life, but it now gets to see the light of day. I used the included legs to allow it to sit on its side. If I let it lay on its back, the case’s footprint consumes too much of my desk’s precious real estate. Better yet, this position draws the eye to my rig’s impressive heatsinks. ? iPhone 7 Plus

A post shared by yetieater (@the_yetieater) on Nov 21, 2017 at 12:15pm PST

The metal arms on the Thermaltake Core P3 hold a plexiglass pane, but I can safely run the case without them, so I pulled them for a cleaner look.

Similarly, I pulled the sticker from the PNY SSD.

That’s what I call aging gracefully!

I’ve got to add a few switches and hubs to the setup so that I don’t have to fiddle around in the limited space behind the desk, but I should be ready to rock and roll, soon!