The Zen of Air Cooling

[JayVenturi]

So, how does one go about air cooling? How does one go about using only air cooling for a reasonable performance PC?
Case design? Coolers? Cable management?

So I gave my wife my prior air cooledPC ( dual 7773x, dual 3090 Ti , 1TB ram etc) workstation (small form factor) and I went about building my upgrade in May, and decided to share some of the air cooling (after a few months) considerations compromises and successes

Current build:

2x 4090 RTX Founders Edition

2x AMD 9684X Epyc (192/384 cores) 2.2GB of L3 cache , Gigabyte MZ73-LM0 Dual socket motherboard, PCIE 5.0

1.5 TB RAM DDR5 ECC LRDIMMs 5600mhz , 2050W digital power supply

4x Micron 9300 Max (15.4TB each) Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus (8TB). 2x Back up drives Micron 5300

Asus PA32UCG-K monitor, MS Data Center 2022 & Ubuntu, Air cooled, cool temps, small case, ultra quiet operation

1x pound of flesh and blood as usual

Build note:
The system is silent at idle or medium workload, even under full press its relatively pleasant and not a bother. temps are reasonable at idle around 29-30C per processor, 4090s under load don’t exceed 55C, house temp is normally 70-72F.
the drives have dedicated cooling fans as well (visible in photo)
The CPU fans go from 450rpm to 3050rpm, but have not seen them spool up high only during power on before the bmc profile kicks in.

Its is using a Hela R 2050w power supply on a 240v socket

Being a new user I can only post 2 pics

[JayVenturi]

closer views

[JayVenturi]

The dual 4090s are on a custom gantry so that they are inverted and blowing warm air (when in use) out and away from motherboard and CPUs

[JayVenturi]

The PC is highest scoring rig on several benchmark forums, as well as having other perfs such as high read and write speeds

[TryTwiceMedia]

@JayVenturi

Being a new user I can only post 2 pics

Fuckin stellar first post

I really expected a wall of monitors with that rig
I am assuming your workload is mostly AI?

[JayVenturi]

Home PC, but I bring home a lot of CNN and RCNN for medical imaging and predictive analytics, so “YES” to answer your question.
I do a lot of work in MRI K space post dissertation

and “Yes” it can do email, surf the web , excel sheets and gaming

[RotaryJunkie]

Nothing obviates the silliness that is dual tower air coolers on LEDT like seeing 96 core Epycs on big singles.

[gysi]

+1 for placing the PC on the floor instead of taking up space on the desk
It’s a silly little pet peeve of mine

[Shadowbane]

Hi, @JayVenturi. I have my computer case on the floor under my desk. I have a few questions, one of which is, what type of case did you use for your system? I have never seen one. It looks like your case is entirely open to the air. Am I right? How hard was it to put together? I am considering building an EPYC first-gen or third-gen system. I was wondering if I could DIY my system or need someone else to put the parts together. I don’t seem to have much luck with hardware. I guess I am asking if EPYC systems are any more challenging to assemble than a consumer PC.

[JayVenturi]

Well, those coolers are on revision 4, going on 5 and work well, especially with some of the threaded algorithms I use, hammered at all core the temps have been manageable and no issues. Don’t let the outside fool you. The base plate of the heatsinks is now all copper, nickel clad frame, the fins have been individually placed on the heatpipes, pasted, and been mindful of full contact. and has increased in thickness to 5mm, the the 6 heat pipes are pressure grabbed and have Metal based TIM in the micro gap areas to improve contact, the fans can spool from 450 to 3050rpm, the BMC fan curve has then at 100% at 75C, but according to the BMC logs that has yet to ever occur even under an all core load.

Here is the fin protype and base that is going on next. I have increased fin density as well:

[JayVenturi]

its a Thermaltake P3, heavily modified for air cooling and obviously the power supply, the drives, board, CPUs, and dual cards. The card framing wqas also custom I did to have the card air blow out and away from the motherboard and CPUs

Here are some other mods I have built using a P! case and a P3 case

[JayVenturi]

[JayVenturi]

other prior builds dating back 25 and 23 years ago, always dual:

[JayVenturi]

The wife’s PC, dual 773x

[JayVenturi]

So the BMC and latest BIOS (F30) have been a collaborative effort sucha s F25 and F29, the F30 bios included additional efforts such as Resizable Bar and refinements in the Ram Disk capability (at boot)

Another interesting feature is the “RAM survives warn reboot”

F32 will bring some additional features

For those that have the MZ73-LM0 board, have you tried the F30 bios? Have you tried the RAM disk?

[JayVenturi]

Sir
yes, entirely open air. the DYI was extensive and somewhat more complicated on the Epyc side. I had to even protype the heatsinks, but the case was alot of cutting , reinforcing and modifying.

You could DYI one yourself and I suggest something like the P3 base as it lent the most amount of possibilities.

here is how the $99 case arrives (amazon)

Front-ish

the back

I hope that helps, was not trying to scare you off from doing it

J

[JayVenturi]

Some heatsink experiments before the next prototype with more (and slightly closer) fins

Almost to final, 5mm copper plate, 6 larger heatpipes, much higher the fin count:

[twin_savage]

Have you thought of using thermal epoxy on each fin’s heatpipe hole during assembly to improve fin-to-heatpipe conductivity?

also +1 on the T30 fans, they are the best noise to performance 120mm fans.

[jode]

Welcome to Level1Techs!

Thanks for sharing your build. I was not aware of the Thermaltake Openframe chassis. Very intriguing!

I had to do a couple of double takes trying to figure out your mods for SSD and PSU placements, cable management. Very cleanly done!

[JayVenturi]

Eventually I may move to the epoxy, but as I’m taking them apart and rebuilding the heatsinks often, for now I’m using less permanent solutions such as the pink krypnaut extreme, and used NHT2 injected and sealed between the pipes and the copper plate. Work in progress.

but good idea