Well hello! It has been a while since I have been here, but now that I have a large chunk of my life back, I am back to making questionable hardware decisions.
I have a 14900K lying around that I haven’t done anything with in some time. I picked up a board that supports DDR4 and 64GB of RAM, so I am buying a case and a cooler to get it ready to go. This PC will replace everything I have running on my mini PCs. I will be running everything in Docker containers, probably on Ubuntu LTS unless I can find a better option, ideally with a GUI. But that is not the point of this post! I want to put it in a 2u case since I want to have this take up the same footprint as the 4 mini PCs I will be upgrading from. I am not space-limited, so if I need to go 4U, I can, but I would like to be inside of a 2U case if possible. The server rack it will be in is right next to my desk, so I am looking for quiet. Services that will run on it will be things like Komga, Audiobookshelf, a couple of Minecraft servers, Home Assistant, Obsidian, Immich, and a handful of other services that I am blanking on or may add in the future.
With all of this in mind, what are my options? Thank you all in advance!
Unless you lower the power limits to 14900T values or sth similar.
2U doesn’t have the height for proper tower coolers. So if you want to cool anything with more than ~100-125W, you need a Dynatron with 6k RPM+ or watercooling. Dynatron is many good things, but quiet isn’t one of them.
Also needs proper airflow from front to the back. CPU cooler needs cool intake too.
I have 2U cases with Ryzen 7900 and Noctua L9x65 that fit into the 2U. Together with the 80mm fan row blasting at the heat sink, it’s fine on temps, although high load eventually converges to high 80Cs. And that’s with a 65W TDP CPU.
For a performance option, there is only Dynatron. My servers are built for low power and low noise.
That is really good to know. I was unaware of the 100-125w TDP for quiet cooling. Very helpful info that I will take into consideration for future builds. I appreciate it!
It’s possible that could be an issue, but generally LGA1700/1851/1954 have more versatile mounting than AM5 so the chances of you being able to rotate the cooler 90 degrees without having to modify it are high.
You best bet under what is currently available is probably something like a white label 2u vapor chamber cooler with the 9RA fan swap:
I have been wanting to play with Proxmox for a long time, but I never find a reason to pick it over Docker. Can you tell me what are some of the things that you are using a hypervisor for?
I’m using Qubes OS which is based on the Xen hypervisor, it’s basically 20 Linux VMs running different everyday applications.
If you allow the CPU to boost it’s going to boost, when I disabled boost the power consumption dropped 100W, and at base clock speed the CPU is still fast.
Your question intrigued me. Personally I have plans to use some Sliger.com 3U chassis with Noctua air cooling. Sliger do make 2U cases as well, but none are listed as having AIO compatibility. So YMMV with regards to fiiting a radiator in one.
I don’t think I personally would want to go less then 3U for high performance CPU’s unless I were to go with a noisy solution. However it did make me think. What about water cooling. A google search of 2U radiators did reveal a few options. But none from vendors I recognise. Maybe something to consider. I’d love to hear what you decide to do in end.