Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
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.
Yes rack-mount sounds like no extra space, the radiator unit is almost precisely the size of a standard 120mm case-fan; it mounts directly under it, the pump unit on the other hand is much smaller and lighter than the heat-sink, and fan
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.
The noise of the water-cooler is entirely the noise of it's case fan; so quiet if the case fan is quiet
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.
Can't comment, but on the two ASUS motherboards one with AMD and one with Intel CPU; that I have; the water coolers on both seems to hold the CPU to case temperature differntial to <30deg C; at 100% CPU utilisation
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.
That is certainly a beast; with regards to cooling these days I consider cooler means longer life; and greater reliability period ! Water-coolers also pump the heat straight out of the case, so there is no reliance on other case fans and possible high case temperatures I do hope that heat sink is connected through the M/B and not just to it! If the M/B is vertical then it is a cantilever load, with 1000gm acting through the CofG; not to mention the larger volume which the fan and heat-sink are taking up in the case.
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.
Not unexpected
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.
Given the expletive deleted fasteners that both AMD and Intel use for attaching their heatsinks and fans; I would use water-coolers even if they were heavier, noisier and the cooling less efficient; and even without over-clocking. The M/B's I tend to use are high end consumer, but second hand.
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.
Tell me when it's for sale !:-)
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 :)
Yes, I look with envy at friends M/B's with BIOS support for PCIe SSD's usually as M2 regards Rohan McLeod