Update: my 7443p has arrived!
With it came an Arctic Freezer 4U-SP3 cooler, as I was fearing that the Supermicro SNK-P0064AP4 I already own will end up noisy together with a hotter CPU. This as the latter’s peak fan speed is 3800rpm (vs 2300rpm x 2 fans for the Arctic), and it does make a lot of noise when on full speed.
Anyhow, the new cooler is fairly heavy even for its size, at 1288g. Many Noctuas of similar fan size are lighter. And I use a tower chassi, meaning that the cooler will contribute to some stress on the motherboard structure. The question is - could the cooler be too heavy for safe vertical mounting?
The cooler is advertised as a 4U server cooler, however most such cases are horizontal (rackmount). And Supermicro would never recommend or comment on anything else than their own coolers. So I wonder if the stress on the motherboard will be a problem during continued operation.
The Arctic Freezer 4U-SP3 weighs 1288g, and is 152mm high. Compare that to the Supermicro SNK-P0064AP on ~750g and 120mm - aproximating the center of gravity to be a bit higher than the middle for both (due to the heatpipes), I compute that the static torque (is that the relevant concept?) expressed by the cooler on the mainboard, will be about 2.2 times higher for the Arctic, than for the Supermicro cooler. All assuming vertical (tower) mounting.
The motherboard I use is a Supermicro H12SSL-I. Similarly to the previous discussion about PCIe slot reinforcement, I foresee that server boards might be less reinforced in the heatsink mounting, compared to consumer boards.
So I turn to you guys for a sanity check, before going further. Any thoughts on this? Does anyone have experience that may reinforce or refute my worry?