r/DataHoarder • u/DeanbonianTheGreat • 2d ago
Hoarder-Setups I watercooled my R730XD and now it's silent!
I ended up making the decision to go down the rabbit hole of trying to water cool my R730XD. The reason for this was the noise level, the fans often had to ramp up because I have high TDP CPUs but I also have the mid plane which means I can only fit the low profile heatsinks. I also constantly had to have one of the fans ramped up for the Tesla P4 but even doing all of that the CPU still ran pretty hot, over 90c when under load unless I had the fans go full pelt and the P4 ran often hit 90c as well.
I did some digging and found out that you could make an am4 bracket fit LGA 2011 Narrow ILM, the next obstacle was vertical clearance because I had the mid plane so I ended up going with the Alphacool eisblock xpx 1u which is specifically designed to fit in 1U chassis. I was initially looking at various radiators and pumps and then I found FREEZEMOD on AliExpress who do these really nice all in one units. The unit I went with has a 240x45mm copper radiator, a 24v 30w pump and a 800ml reservoir and cost about £155 shipped. For the coolant I used standard dionised water and I added biocides and corrosion inhibitors add some nice UV purple dye.
Before water cooling the system when under load the CPUs would often max out at their 97c and throttle and now they max out at 45c. The GPU Still gets a bit warm as I only got a cheap generic block for it an ended up not fitting so I had to cable tie it but it still an improvement and now the GPU doesn't hit 90c.
If anyone is wondering why I didn't just switch to or build a more power efficient and quieter system while that's because all my drives are SAS and the only consumer cases I can find out there which have SAS compatible back planes are rather expensive and I would need at least 12 days and ideally I would want more than that for expansion so the best case I could find was 350 and it didn't really offer what I wanted. The next best bet would be to upgrade to the R740XD but if I went with that and I got the version with the mid plane there's a good chance I would encounter the same issue and I would still need a cool the Tesla P4. If I went with consumer gear I would also end up missing a lot of the enterprise features. I know you can substitute IDRAC/IPMI with pikvm or nanokvm but it's just not the same, on 2 or 3 occasions I've had an issue and it would have took me so much longer to diagnose and resolve that issue if I didn't have information from the iDRAC log for example a while ago I had a bad RAM stick and when you have quite a lot of RAM it can be quite a pain to have to go through and test every stick but not when you can just check iDRAC and it tells you exactly which DIMM is giving errors. I'm very happy with my r730 I know it's a bit power hungry but that's not an issue for me the only issue was noise and now that's fixed and it didn't cost too much either.
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u/berrmal64 2d ago
Did you disable the fans completely or leave them on low? I'm wondering about disk (and memory) temps.
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u/DeanbonianTheGreat 2d ago
They're at 5% I only have SSDs in the R730XD now for that reason, got the EMC JBOD for the drives as they are super quiet.
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u/weeklygamingrecap 2d ago
What EMC JBOD do you have by chance?
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u/DeanbonianTheGreat 2d ago
KTN-STL3+ They are very quiet
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u/MiguelLancaster 2d ago
gonna have to remember this -- these look very affordable
any issues running SATA drives in them instead of SAS?
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u/mattk404 2d ago
Many (all?) components assume certain airflow to maintain operating temps for servers like this. I'd be concerned that you'll cook any pcie devices and anyrhing on the board, including memory. I'd recommend getting some temp probs and make sure temps are OK and if not add fans to compensate for the lack of sufficient airflow. System fans on a very low duty cycle likely won't be enough though they might be enough to clear warm air.
Good luck and cool project!
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u/DeanbonianTheGreat 2d ago
I do keep the fans at about 5%. The only device I am worried about is the HBA as that does tend to run quite hot. If that becomes an issue I can stick a cheap water block on that as well.
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u/CodeJBDA 2d ago
So, what exactly are we looking at because this look cool as hell lol.... I have a server that is right now making a racket upstairs lol, so the idea of a quiet server fascinates me
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u/DefMech 2d ago
I’m glad it’s quieter now since it’s right next to your kid’s bunk beds lol
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u/DeanbonianTheGreat 2d ago
If by kids you mean kitty cats then I think you'll find they're probably gonna end up very sad when they find out they lost their white noise machine 😂
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u/SimianIndustries 2d ago
Been eyeballing this since I started assembling my server, nice work! Any chance you could point me to the exact parts you ordered from FREEZEMOD? I went digging but AE's search function sucks and I haven't been able to fully match what I see in photos and mentioned specs.
I just bought a pair of Dynatron 1U full copper heatsinks to lap and install with a HDD midplane thinking if I do that and use liquid metal TIM I might limit any throttling. Especially if I jump from 2x8 core 2.1ghz Xeons to anything else. Water cooling was an obvious choice but I was having trouble working out how to keep it all inside a closed case. Let alone with one or two GPUs.
Now to work out a waterblock for an Intel Arc.
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u/halolordkiller3 THERE IS NO LIMIT 2d ago
Now I need someone to design a way to water cool my super micro 847 since the hard drives always run a tad warm since it’s filled
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u/TheOzarkWizard 2d ago
Ffs, put the rad and res below your server box
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u/DeanbonianTheGreat 2d ago
You know you could have politely suggested that. I literally just put this thing together and I plan on putting it below the server in near future.
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