On 20.05.18 23:20, Rohan McLeod via luv-main wrote:

That is certainly a beast; with regards to cooling these days I consider cooler means longer life; and greater reliability period !

As Arrhenius says, each 10°C hotter halves the lifespan. It's not just the CPU, but electrolytic capacitors don't like to cook either. (Even if it says e.g. 105°C on them, they'll last 16 times longer at 65°C, and that's not forever.)

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

Heatpipes are compact, incredibly good thermal conductors, and won't leak water over the mobo. There's an awful lot to like about them. (First encountered them in 1973, but they were expensive then.) ...

Yes, I look with envy at friends M/B's with BIOS support for PCIe SSD's usually as M2

The UdooX86 is around 125 x 85 mm, with an optional M.2 SSD, held on the back with one screw and the socket. It is a very neat little package. I ran debian on it, but have switched to devuan. Its graphics performance is very good, though I haven't tried the three screens. Erik

On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 11:20:36PM +1000, Rohan McLeod wrote:

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

yeah, i've got an all-in-one water cooler in one of my machines. I've got another sitting in its box because it's no better or quiter than the CPU cooler I was going to replace it with (bought the wrong one carelessly). BTW, for a water cooler to be significantly better than a heat-sink and fan, you really need at least a 240mm long radiator unit - i.e. 2 x 120mm fans. Some tower cases have 2 spots for fans at the rear where they can fit, and some have mounting points for top-mounted radiators (these often have room for a 360mm radiator and 3 fans)

The noise of the water-cooler is entirely the noise of it's case fan; so quiet if the case fan is quiet

If they have to work hard, the pump noise becomes noticable, just like any other mechanical device. if the water cooler is appropriately sized for the CPU it's cooling, then the pump is nearly silent.

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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

Here's an interesting comparison by Gamers Nexus of some liquid and air coolers for Threadripper CPUs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FffaOYQpI6k BTW, I mis-remembed the difference shown from this - the ~$95 AUD 140mm noctua heatsink is around 9 degrees C worse than the ~ $250 AUD Enermax 240mm liquid cooler (the cheapest price i've seen for this in AU is about $240 plus postage, on ebay). That's under continuous load, running a benchmark. Idle, the difference is about 2 degrees. My typical usage pattern has the CPU mostly almost-idle with occasional bursts of high load, so I'd expect the average difference to be around 3 or 4 degrees. IMO the liquid cooler isn't worth the extra $150-ish. Both of those are designed for the threadripper CPU. The video also compares a good All-in-One watercooler that ISN'T designed for the threadripper - the kind that AMD included a mounting bracket for with the TR4 CPU - it is about 4 degrees worse than the 140mm Noctua. Entirely due to the fact that the cooler doesn't completely cover the CPU's heat spreader.

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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

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

If I were running it under continuous high load, I'd be concerned. But I don't expect that to be the case. Even when I get around to virtualising my Win 7 steam gaming box(*), my usage pattern will be mostly the same, with occasional gaming sessions where it might max out 4 or 8 cores for a few hours. (*) one of my reasons for getting a Threadripper rather than a Ryzen 7. Twice as many CPU cores & threads and, most importantly, 64 PCI-e lanes rather than 20, so I can have 16 lanes just for VGA passthrough to the VM. I plan to retire the win7 box with the VM's OS disk on my nvme drives and the steam games library on a HDD zfs dataset (accessed by the win7 VM over the local VM bridge network). The games library will benefit from the ZFS ARC and L2ARC - at the moment, if I want top disk performance for any given game, I have to manually move it from the win7 box's HDD to its fairly small SSD, which requires moving some other game from the SSD back to the HDD. I won't have to do that tedious crap any more. Mostly, though, I'm virtualising it so That there'll be one less machine in the house taking up space and using power.

 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.

yep, it is. Ryzen and Threadripper have a good design for mounting the coolers. it's a vast improvement compared to older CPUs - mounting the fan was always a PITA. Now it's just 4 spring-loaded screws to bolt it down to the motherboard, which has a metal bracket around the CPU connected to a metal plate on the back of the board. The fan needs 165mm clearance in the case. It's not uncommon to get cases these days with 170 or 180mm or even more clearance above the CPU. I chose my new case carefully since I knew I'd be putting a giant heatsink in it, decided on a Fractal Design R5.

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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 !:-)

Well, it aint exactly cheap, but I've been saving up for this upgrade since around 2013. Not that I knew exactly what I'd be getting, but I've been putting money aside for my next upgrade for years....and haven't like the cost to performance-increase ratio of anything up until the Ryzen and Threadripper CPUs were released. Upgrading from DDR-3 to DDR-4 is also very expensive. Seems to be a lot of price-fixing between the three main RAM manufacturers, RAM prices are double or more what they were a year or two ago. There was nothing new by AMD worth upgrading to, and just to switch to Intel would have cost over $1000 to get roughly equivalent performance to what I already had. $1500 to $2000 for significantly better performance. I paid more than that for this Threadripper upgrade but I'm getting a proportionally much bigger performance increase for my money, and unlike the Intel stuff, I know that I won't have to throw out and replace my motherboard or my RAM or anything else for my next upgrade. AMD have committed to this socket and mobo platform until at least 2020. And by then we'll have DDR5 RAM and PCI-e 4.0 or 5.0 (rumour has it that PCIe 4.0 might be skipped because ) Intel makes no such committment to upgrade compatibility - quite the opposite, with very few exceptions their SOP is to make make each new CPU model incompatible with their previous motherboards - even when they're using the exact same socket. So you can't just swap the CPU, you have to get a new motherboard too. I don't expect to be upgrading any time soon, but I want the option to do so. I also want socket compatibility for other machines I might upgrade (like my server box), so I can choose which machine gets which CPU whenever I upgrade.

Yes, I look with envy at friends M/B's with BIOS support for PCIe SSD's usually as M2

if you want a reasonably priced upgrade with support for NVME SSDs, look at something like the Ryzen 3 2200G ($139) or Ryzen 5 2400G ($230) with a B350 ($110-$150) or X370 ($160 to $360) motherboard. So, a minimum upgrade cost of $250. plus DDR-4 memory, of course, if your current system is still DDR-3. Those two CPUs include quite decent radeon vega GPUs built-in. The 2200G has 4 CPU cores / 4 threads with Vega 8 GPU. The 2400G has 4 CPU cores & 8 threads with Vega 11 GPU. The built-in GPUs share memory with the CPU of course, so it's best to use fast RAM with it - DDR4-3200 or better. Another option is combining either of those motherboards with a Ryzen 7 2700X ($469). No built-in GPU, but 8 cores / 16 threads at 4.3 Ghz. The 2700X has a much faster clock speed than my Threadripper (3.4Ghz), so is much faster for things that don't need more than 16 threads running at once (i.e. almost everything). I would have been more than happy with it if I didn't need more PCI-e lanes, and saved myself nearly $1000. It would have been OK even for virtualising windows, I'd just have to have the host's GPU and the VM's GPU using 8 lanes each rather than 16. That would be just fine, except on some games that really need the memory bandwidth. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>