I’ve recently bought a second hand Gigabyte G292-Z20 to serve as a base for a homelab setup, but I’m at my wits end trying to disable fans that are in the way. The chassis has a total of 8 fans, 6 of which are meant to cool datacenter GPUs. I have no need for these extremely loud fans, and two rear ones are even blocking PCIe IO on the back, so I figured I’d just remove the ones I don’t need.
Unfortunately, removing the fans seems to make the motherboard very angry, immediately firing off “critical fan speed” alerts, and spinning all other fans up to an unbearably loud maximum speed. Does anyone happen to know how to properly disable fans on a machine like this?
Find no way to deactivate or throttle the 8 Chassis Fans, so I replace the 6 GPU Chassis Fans with Dummy Fans / Fan Simulators and for the last 2 CPU/Board Chassis Fans I buy new silent Fans. Now the Server is pretty quiet and I’m happy
have the same problem, it’s a great server, but it’s LOUDER than the 20 year old SuperMicro server X-D while consuming ALMOST (250W) the same (300W) amount of energy.
Dear suf_nok,
what kind of Dummy fans were used?
is it possible to poti throttle the GPU fans to bearable noise levels? (currently living room is the datacenter)
because right now no GPUs installed and let’s see when there will be.
I have the same server now, gonna put two GPU’s in it.
Looking in the Magarac there’s a fan profile setting,
I was able to lower the noise below a 747 landing on your face
Which fan simulators did you use? I tried the ones for Red Devil 6 pin fans, but they didn’t work (neither voltage nor RPM was simulated). Can you recommend the ones you purchased?
I adjusted the GPU fan speeds to initialize at 1% duty and the SYS fans to initialize at 5% through the BMC. The rest is up to the fan curve. It’s brought the noise level to bearable measures.
Problem is, there are 6 fans still spinning. Much quieter in terms of db output, but those 6 fans contribute to the noise intensity and power consumption.
I spent all day exhaustively trying to disable the fans through IPMI, but no luck. Even if you use freeipmi tool to disable their power sensors, their RPM sensors, their ability to make assertions and deassertions completely, then the system will still blast all available fans to 100% if you remove a GPU fan.
And freeipmi settings don’t even survive a BMC warm reset.
The utility tools offered by Gigabyte aren’t much help here. Neither is ipmitool. No BIOS setting for fans, so I guess Gigabyte just never imagined someone would buy this unit without a load in each GPU compartment.
It says it’s compatible with Whatsminer M20s and M21s, which have a different layout. 4 out of 6 connections match, though (assuming yellow and blue are the same signals on both fans).
I found these 4-pin fan simulators which are labelled. They match the fan header order on the board. They just don’t have the additional + and - that would have been pins 5 and 6. The BMC won’t register the lack of these signals as a critical error.
You’ll need to insert them “backwards” into the motherboard to match the pinout of the original fans. (you’ll be able to bend the connectors of the fan simulators to fit them in, as shown in the photo).
This works. I silenced all my GPU fans and they showed up as ‘ok’ in ipmitool.
But for some reason, my SYS fans kept cycling from slow to fast every few seconds. It was the fan profile. To solve this, set each policy with GPU fans to initialize them at 20% duty and then try to keep them at 20%. I don’t know exactly why this works. Maybe it’s looking for a reasonable RPM for the fan to have at 1% duty (my original setpoint) and the reading was too far off for these fan simulators.
I’m happy with this. The machine has the same volume in db, but the noise intensity is much, much more tolerable.
Also, I haven’t found any photos of the underside of this board online, so I will post some. If you know for sure that you want your GPU fans permanently disabled, you can more easily insert the fan simulators on the power distribution board. All 8 fan connections live here.
I couldn’t disable the fans completely but the BMC interface does let you adjust fan curves and you can set them to run at 1% up to 80C on all sensors.
BMC default username/password are admin and the serial number (or some last digits of it?). Fan control is under settings on the left once you sign in.
I was able to lower the noise by setting a fan profile in BMC. But everytime i turn off the g292 completely it defaults back to the standard profile aka mirage mode.
@suf_noK@campfire Did you notice any drop in power draw after installing these fan simulators ? How much is the Idle power consumption with and without GPUs and the fans ?
For me the idle nosie isn’t too bad and I do need to cool GPUs, but the full speed under load puts an HPE C7000’s 2kw of fans to shame on the “your neighbors are going to complain about the noise” scale.
Seriously, hearing protection is likely required to be around one of these at full tilt, let alone a full isle of them. I can see why so many of the 2U Gigabyte GPU servers were converted to emersion cooling.
I’m going to test lowering the fan profile and how the cooling holds up. If that doesn’t work, I’ll figure out replacing the fans.
Had anyone tried replacing the fans on one of these yet? I’m expecting I’ll have to crimp me connectors. The hard/expensive parts will likely be sourcing quieter 80mm higher pressure fans (120mm were pretty easy).
FYI, the 747 comment is pretty accurate for the idle noise. I live near an airport and most landing traffic flies directly over me. The sound level of pretty similar, and possibly why the idle fans don’t bug me much, though the fan whine of these fans is particularly annoying.
Does anyone know if it’s possible to replace the jet engine fans with “normal” fans ? I would like to place some fans directly on the gpus and cpu cooler
These “ultra-violent cooling fans” do a great job at keeping 8x AMD Mi50s in check, even at fairly low duty %. The amount of air they push and the pressure they can maintain is impressive. Of course, as noted, the noise is similarly impressive.
Just in case you haven’t already, you need to alter Policy 2 in addition to Policy 1–Policy 2 changes fan speed based on the current pulled by the 12V lines in the GPU risers, and it’ll juice the fan speeds very quickly on a medium GPU load if you haven’t changed it from the default. Since I’m using cheap, used datacenter GPUs, I don’t mind keeping things more or less at the minimum until the GPU temps get up around 70, at which point they’ll ramp pretty quickly.
What I did was make a new policy which monitors the temps of every GPU and the CPU, not just the CPU, and controls the fan speed of all fans. I did testing at full GPU terminal saturation load to tune the fan curve. The default start of 30% was massive overkill. At around 25%, the dual 4090’s at 12 hours full load were running around 65C. I have the curve get more aggressive ever 10C.
