So I am putting a P4 in my home server. I don’t have server air flow and with all the heat sinks etc for a blower style (probably). I had some abs laying around and am using this as a proof of concept. If it works ok, I’ll probably modify the original heat sink cover. I’m going to cover the end of it too so all the air goes down the card.
Interesting take. The conclusion I drew from these fans was that these don’t have enough cfm. According to ChatGPT, 1 watt can be disappated with 1 cfm. I don’t know if this is true but it was the only way for me to get some kind of idea of how much cfm you actually need. Based on that I used this adapter.
Along with a high speed (loud) 60mm fan it does stay cool. You can even add an adapter from 60mm to 80mm to try to combat the noise.
Nevertheless, interesting way to cool it. Would love to know if it works as intended and what your temps are.
ChatGPT is good at bullshitting but my experience is it’s usually wrong and only once so far have I encountered it coming up with a useful answer. One CFM per watt is technically true but a +2.5 °C exhaust ΔT is low (the conversion’s well documented and calculating ΔΤ = W / (Q ρ cₚ) is faster and easier than trying to get ChatGPT to fix its mistakes). +10-20 °C’s more common across the compute hardware I’m familiar with.
Also simple to convert between LFM and volumetric flow rates, though I’m not seeing Nvidia specified an LFM for either the P4’s active or passive versions. Card should be fine with single digit CFM through it, so probably wants something like 250-300 LFM depending on its exact interior dimensions.
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I’ve still gotta see how to monitor temps. Right now I just have proxmox set up. Planning on passing through the GPU for transcoding.
I’ll snap a pic of the case with the card in. With just the default fan speeds on the header, it was getting hot by touch. I read a reddit post where a guy took the cover off and just mounted the fan over the GPU. Once I get temps monitored, I’ll try a few things. I was reading a walk through the other day on adding CPU and GPU temps to proxmox.
I’m not sure if this could be of any help in Proxmox: https://getfancontrol.com/
I have only tested it in windows and in most cases it can find the MB fan header so you can control the fan speed, if your GPU fan is connected to the MB.
I had a couple P4s. I used this to cool them,
Worked pretty good, average temps in the 40-50c range.
I’ve looked at just about every option. I’ll probably try some stuff once I get a 3D printer. I plan on it occupying the space where this server is.
I don’t want to spend money on stuff that might not fit. As you can see there isn’t a lot of clearance. Psensor in ububtu told me I was idling at 40c. It is definitely cooler than the other day. I am going to remove the cover and just strap the fan to it and see what it says. I also forgot to cover the end.
I’ll have to check it out. I had the fan control in my ipmi interface.
You could mount a 40mm fan or two on the back of the case pulling air threw the card.
Like I did here when the front fan RPM speed was to slow for full load cooling.
All that is needed is the fan and a couple zip ties. lol
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So I decided to try this…but I forgot to test it on my desk before sticking it back in the closet. It is idling about 3C than on my desk; however, it’s 5C higher in the top of my closet. I need to put in some active cooling to vent that heat into the pantry next door.
Now I have some desk space back, I am going to get a 3d printer.
As above you could also flip the fan so that the out side air is being forced across the card if the outer cap was back on it’d cool better. You setup now is pulling hot air inside the case and forcing that onto the card. I had fans like those and top speed is only about 5k RPM. Now blowing the out side air in threw the back across the card you would need to have your case fans so they help that incoming air by not blowing hot out of the case so that outer fan is not pulling it back in. That’s why I suggested pulling it threw from the back because as we all know case fan setups are mostly setup with air being pulled threw the front and sent out the back.
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