AMD EPYC Siena 8324P cooling options?

So, would one need an HBA card to take advantage of SATA with that board? Or is there a simpler adapter that merely breaks out the SATA lanes?

Thanks!

I have the SIENAD8-2L2T, Epyc 8434P (48 core) and the NH-U14S cooler in a Fractal Define 7. Yes, the cooler is north/south airflow, so I just swapped in the vented top that came with the case. At idle CPU is at 27C and never go very high under load, though I haven’t done lengthy load tests yet. It’s massive, I can’t see how a ~200W CPU can get hot with it.

I put in https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007110631377.html for 16x SATA using four cables https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005831252365.html . Added two https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005575811095.html for a bunch of PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs. So one 16x and one 8x free still, plus the two MCIO for future U.2/U.3.

2 Likes

That’s what my rough estimates were too, thanks for confirming. That’s amazing and will provide value for years to come (German KWh pricing :frowning: ). I also plan on Kubernetes and also Ceph, so 20-50% load figures are important. Background noise on a cluster and lots of containers add up (especially over time as they increase in numbers).

And if there is no heat (100W isn’t “heat”), no reason for high RPM fan speeds. Living room compatible EPYC…I like it.

Thanks for clarifying that. My setup will be fairly similar, a bit more networking and more RAM (just 1.1V RDIMMs, but they need power as well) but no GPU and more NVMe get added over time.

1 Like

Do you know if it’s easy to pass SATA from MCIO to TrueNAS from within a hypervisor like Proxmox? I.e., are the IOMMU groups suitable with MCIO in this case?

Yeah, in desktop data’s it’s more like 2-6 dB(A) isothermal spreads among comparable coolers.

I don’t know of any good data for 2U compatible fans. For 120s in 4U Arctic’s P12 and P12 Max impellers are quite decent but, given Arctic’s confused P12 blade vibration hum for motor noise, it seems questionable they’re actually Arctic designs rather than contracted out. I’ve never had luck identifying an OEM for Arctic, though.

The NF-A12x25’s a good retuning of the Gentle Typhoon to lower RPMs, so may not be the most effective choice (it’s outperformed by the Typhoons at higher RPMs), and it’s somewhat debatable whether it’s really a Noctua design. Even Noctua’s marketing points out their other 120s are poor.

1 Like

Any idea on where one can buy it in the US for a sane price?

I have a different motherboard (SIENAD8-2L2T), but unfortunately the iommu groups are not suitable for passing on the SATA controller on the SoC to a virtual machine (unraid in my case):

root@proxmox-0:~# ./iommu.sh | grep 12
IOMMU Group 12 c0:07.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:149f] (rev 01)
IOMMU Group 12 c0:07.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14a7] (rev 01)
IOMMU Group 12 c0:07.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14a7] (rev 01)
IOMMU Group 12 c8:00.0 Non-Essential Instrumentation [1300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14ac] (rev 01)
IOMMU Group 12 c8:00.1 System peripheral [0880]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14dc]
IOMMU Group 12 c8:00.4 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14c9] (rev da)
IOMMU Group 12 c9:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 91)
IOMMU Group 12 c9:00.1 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 91)
root@proxmox-0:~# ./iommu.sh | grep 32
IOMMU Group 32 00:07.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:149f] (rev 01)
IOMMU Group 32 00:07.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14a7] (rev 01)
IOMMU Group 32 00:07.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14a7] (rev 01)
IOMMU Group 32 0b:00.0 Non-Essential Instrumentation [1300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14ac] (rev 01)
IOMMU Group 32 0b:00.1 System peripheral [0880]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14dc]
IOMMU Group 32 0b:00.4 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:14c9] (rev da)
IOMMU Group 32 0b:00.5 Encryption controller [1080]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Genoa CCP/PSP 4.0 Device [1022:14ca]
IOMMU Group 32 0c:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 91)
IOMMU Group 32 0c:00.1 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 91)

RIght now I’ve passed the individiual disks on as qemu block devices to my unraid VM, but I think I’m going to eat the power consumption penalty of adding a HBA back in and passing that through instead.

As for your initial question, I went with the Noctua 4U cooler. When I load all cores, it keeps them well below 60C so I think it’s more than sufficient cool this cpu:

k10temp-pci-00c3
Adapter: PCI adapter
Tctl:         +56.9°C
Tccd1:        +55.0°C
Tccd2:        +56.8°C
Tccd3:        +55.5°C
Tccd4:        +55.2°C
1 Like

No, not on my specific motherboard at least (ME03-PE0).
SATA Controllers are grouped in with other stuff.

1 Like

I have SIENAD8-2L2T, it doesn’t have SATA on MCIO, instead it has 16x SATA on two of the PCIe 16x slots, you can run up to 32x SATA on it using those two slots.

I have passed through one of these slots, 16x SATA ports, in my Proxmox to Truenas Scale VM. I selected Raw device, all functions, PCIe. Works perfectly fine. I used the https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007110631377.html .