I have a Lenovo P620 that I really like, the only problem is the case it comes in, too small and thermals are not great, let alone the noise it makes with so few and high revving fans.
I’m seriously considering moving everything to Phanteks Enthoo Pro | Closed Panel. I checked many cases but I couldn’t find one drastically better and I happen to have one laying around
I have 2 main concerns about this switch but so far I’ve convinced myself I got a workaround for both:
1- the proprietary PSU: I have enough space in the case for sure, I might have to improvise how to hold it in place but I’m really not too concerned about it. Besides, I won’t be moving around the case much.
2- the proprietary motherboard connector to the front IO of the case: It looks like a pcie slot but facing sideways, so I’m assuming I can’t connect it to the new case to power the pc on. But I believe that’s not a dealbreaker because the PC turns on when I plug the AC cable and as far as I can tell that’s a bios configuration.
What do you think? Am I on the right track? Anything else I should pay attention to?
I’ll provide pictures of both connectors when I’m home but I’ve been thinking about this for a while and I wanted to get this conversation started.
I ended up trying it out but I underestimated a much simpler problem. The motherboard has 11 screws, not a single one matches any of the standoffs in the case and to add insult to injury the last pcie slot of the case interferes with the PSU, I can’t even plug it in to the motherboard
The silver lining is that the IO shield fit perfectly haha
I’ll find another use for the Lenovo.
I have a few P620s, and yes thermals are not great in the IO area of the case. CPU is ok (never over 90c with a 5955x)
I used some double sided 3M tape, a couple BeQuiet! 80mm fans with a cheap Amazon/Noctua PWM controller plus SATA power cable and I mounted them in a couple spots in the case. My 100gbe mellanox cards used to complain temps where in the 80s, now high 50s/low 60s and the overall sound is lower as the CPU fan is doing less too.
can you share a picture to see where you placed them?
I’m interested to see where you plugged the PWM controller. Out of the box you get only 4 SATA power connectors, did you need to get extras?
Grab an Asrock Rack, Gigabyte, or SuperMicro (alphabetical, not order to look for) ATX or EATX motherboard and standard power supply that fits your case then harvest away.
Sell the left overs of the P620 as a barebones server on eBay and enjoy.
Very interesting thread, I didn’t notice it before.
I won’t be able to use anything from the P620 anyways, because the whole point was to use its proprietary motherboard, PSU and locked CPU.
I haven’t looked at this option though yet but I’m determined to have a dedicated NAS. Your thread raises a good point about power consumption that although I was aware of I was underestimating. Now that I completely discarded the P620 I’ll look into Coffee Lake Xeons.
Thanks!!
Yeah, it sucks and it’s funny they argue it’s due to security reasons, but oh well.
I checked Coffee Lake Xeons but they have 128gb RAM as limit and I want to build a NAS with tons of RAM. Do you know off the top of your head if there’s an Intel CPU that support 512gb or higher RAM and it’s comparable to Coffee Lake? I’ll research it this weekend.
I do not have pictures of the guts of my P620s, as they are all running right now. But, here’s a pic I modified from Storage Review of the guts of the P620, and the red lines are where I placed the 80mm fans. Your placement will vary depending on what cards you have installed and what lengths things are. In one of my machines, I had a couple ASUS 4x NVME cards, and attached the fans to them.
and on the machines that I had a PCIe slot free I used this (it does not used a PCIe connection, just takes of a slot and gives you access to manually tune fan speed),
In the olden golden days, I used to use painters tape and zip ties to attach 40mm 7000rpm fans to SAS cables in Supermicro cases to provide direct cooling for some RAID HBAs. I borrowed that technique to get the P620 better cooling.
I also used this set up on my Lenovo P5, it made a huge difference for my 25Gbe Mellanox cards. Went from 75C to 39C all the time. Memory temps also went down from around mid 50s to low 40’s since more air was circulating in the case.