On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 07:32:03PM +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:
Or they could replace the shitty server fans with high-quality low noise fans.
Or for $50 - $100; they could just replace the "shitty server fans", with a proprietary water-cooler; - removing both the noise and the possibility that the clunky aluminium heat sink, loosens from the CPU eg http://www.msy.com.au/453-water-cooling-
Trouble is that water coolers may not (and probably won't) fit in most server rack-mount cases. Fans, though, are standard sizes and replacing noisy fans with quieter & better versions of same will fit without a problem. There's a huge difference between a good fan running at ~1500-2000 rpm vs a shitty fan running at 3000-4000 rpm. Also, unfortunately, sometimes water cooling can actually be louder than a good heatsink and fan. It depends on how hard the water pump and radiator fan have to work vs how hard the heat sink fan has to work. and what types of fans are being used, of course. And water cooling isn't always better than a good heatsink & fan, anyway. That's why I decided on the Noctua NH-U14S-TR4-SP3 for my Threadripper CPU, a bloody big metal heat sink - about 1kg of copper heat pipes and shiny alumnium fins - with a very quiet 140mm fan. All the reviews said it worked extremely well, that it greatly out-performed most water coolers for cooling the CPU, and was extremely quiet. Also, to get water cooling that was actually better than it, I'd have to spend at least $200 AUD or so (more than double what the Noctua cost me) - and even then the difference would be about minimal, roughly 5-7 degrees C. The Threadripper is a bit of a special case, though - the CPU is huge, much bigger than the Ryzen 3, 5, or 7 CPUs, and bigger than intel i3, i5, i7 CPUs too. Until very recently, most water cooler blocks didn't completely cover the CPU so were far from optimal in performance. The older style water coolers that weren't designed for the TR4 socket actually perform much worse than the heatsink & fan. If I were into extreme overclocking, I might consider going for high-end water cooling...but I'm not. I might overclock it from 3.4GHhz to 3.8 or maybe 4.0, depending on whether it's stable or not (I expect my machines to run 24/7 for months at a time, minimum. if they can't do that then there's something wrong with them that needs to be fixed immediately). Also depending on whether it's annoyingly noisy or not - more heat causes the fan to spin faster, and more rpm = more noise. The fact that, even without any overclocking, this 16-core/32-thread beast can compile a 4.16 kernel from 'make clean ; make defconfig; make bzImage' in about 53 seconds makes me think that even stock speed is more than adequate, so I'll be happy with that or a modest overclock. PS: IMO given what you can get in consumer-grade computer gear these days, the only reason to bother with a free old server machine is the word "free". "really cheap" might be a good enough reason too. If you're actually paying real money for it, you're better off with good quality consumer stuff. and no need to buy some industrial earmuffs :) craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>