Project: Silent Server

[cavemanoc]

Finally a reason to start a post in here - hurrah!

I was given a rack mountable server ages ago and have finally gotten round to using it. I consists of:

P4 2.8Ghz
1Gb Geil Value
Asus P4P800-vm (mAtx)

I've now added:

1Tb Seagate F1
Thermaltake 520W/380W Dual Power PurePower
Noctua NF-P12
Noctua NF-S12
Rubbish Beige Box
Loads of neoprene
Sythe Kama bay-cooling-thingy.

The idea was to have it completely silent so I could leave it in the back of my desk and forget about it (in the guest room so obviously don't want to have to switch it off everytime visitors come around.) So I went for the Thermaltake which is brilliant - with the fan attached it gives 520W, but you can run it completely passively at 380W which is more than enough!

Obviously I couldn't get complete silence so I went for the Noctuas. I have clad the entire case with neoprene (rip roll-mat ) and it was pretty much silent - but - surprise surprise - the case rapidly heated up and the whole case became hot to the touch .

I've added in the Kama, removed a bit of neoprene to allow a little airflow - and so far so good. With my ear against the case I can just about hear the air moving into it, and of course - the sound of the Samsung - shows how silent it is if the Samsung is loud!

I've splashed out on the Scythe Himuro, which hopefully will silence the sammy.

I've got Windows Home Server on at the moment (my beta dumped me unceremoniously last time I turned it on so I finally bought the full thing.)

I'll plonk a couple of pics in here as soon as the camera comes home.

 

[cavemanoc]

I still need a little help though. Even with the 2 Noctuas (one on the CPU and one on the case) and the Scythe Kama the case is slowly heating up and taking the CPU with it. When I prime it the temperature slowly rises through 70°C at which point I chickened out. The problem is the PSU - even with its excellent heatsinks there just isn't enough airflow to keep it cool and as it raises the case temp - so the cpu follows - even at idle the temp is slowly creeping

I am watching it at the moment to see if it stabilizes, but as it stands I'm pretty sure that once I let WHS go and it starts indexing/backing up my network I'll soon be cooking on the case - anyone got any ideas?

 

[cavemanoc]

I was half tempted to swap in the wife's old 1.8 Northwood to help cool things down but I just couldn't do it - still toying with the idea of slapping a P4-m in there (little adapter wasn't it?). This is the problem with salvaging old kit - always tempted to upgrade and you end up throwing away everything you started with

Unfortunately the board I'm on has no options for underclocking - I might have a toy with undervolting and see if I can save a bit that wa.

 

[cavemanoc]

Already done - "Rubbish Beige Box" in the added section. No way that PSU would have fitted in the original box

Seems to have stabilized at 49°C at idle - I'll wait a bit then give the stress test another go - any idea on the max for the prescott?

 

[cavemanoc]

I did wonder that myself - but I have to say that when I moved stuff over this morning it got pretty loaded up - even though I'm using a pci gigabit card - I think it's the load on the PSU that's causing most of the heat, and in turn heating up the CPU rather than the workload on the chip itself - when I ran it with the side off it stayed nice and cool under load (<50ish)

I'll have to spend a bit longer on it, but it looks like it might around 75C, which would be fine if that is genuinely as far as it goes - I was a little disappointed as I've set the bios to throttle the chip to 50% at 70C, but it doesn't seem to work - got to 75 in mbm5 and still showed 2.8 in CPU-z. Could be a discrepancy between bios temp and Mbm5 - i'll try reducing the threshold to 50C and see if it does work - that would solve all the problems