I recently put together a simple CAD model of the Supermicro H13SSL motherboard, and I figured it might be useful to others working on custom builds, or designing enclosures.
The model includes the basic board layout with accurate dimensions and mounting hole placements. It’s not ultra-detailed (no components like capacitors or chips moddeled) and only the most important connectors have been placed, but it should be more than enough for space planning and fitment checks.
I finally had the time to build the custom air shroud and test it. I used 1mm HDPE sheet material, which I cold bent into shape. It wasn’t exactly easy to work with, but the glued parts help it hold its shape quite well and in the end, it was definitely worth the effort.
With the original Supermicro fans, cooling is rock solid, taking into acount I’m using a passive 2U SP5 heat sink. They never even run at 100% and overall I had no thermal issues at all.
However, the same can’t be said about the Noctua fans (as a quieter alternative) which I switched to. While they’re fine under moderate load, they struggled a lot under sustained heavy workloads. To fix this, I added an extra Noctua NF-A6 as an exhaust fan mounted directly to the rear of the heat sink. That helped eliminate thermal throttling entirely.
